Lavo Čermelj

In the 1930s, he was one of the foremost representatives of Slovene anti-Fascist émigrés from the Italian-administered Julian March, together with Josip Vilfan, Ivan Marija Čok, and Engelbert Besednjak.

After graduating from the German-language lyceum in his native town, he enrolled at Charles University in Prague, where he studied law for one year.

After the war he returned to Trieste, then already part of the Kingdom of Italy, where he worked as a professor at a private Slovene-language high school.

In 1935, he published the volume Life-and-Death Struggle of a National Minority: The Yugoslavs in Italy, in which he described the persecution of the Slovenes and Croats in the Julian March and in Venetian Slovenia.

After World War II, he collaborated as an expert for the Yugoslav foreign ministry, and after 1947 he dedicated himself mostly to the study of the legal position of the Slovene minority in Italy.