All Slovenian diacritics can henceforth be printed in Italian passports, which had long been a wish of the Slovenian minority in Italy. The letter č has been available for a long time, š and ž have now been added as well, the Trieste-based Slovenian minority newspaper has reported.

According to Primorski Dnevnik, all those letters have been printed correctly in Italian ID cards and other documents, but not passports.

Under a special act on the rights of the Slovenian minority in Italy, members of the minority have the right to have their name spelled correctly in official documents.

The parity board, a special body overseeing the implementation of the act, has spent years warning about the absence of carons in the letters č, š and ž.

The Italian Interior Ministry issued a memo in September ordering that all Slovenian letters be correctly printed in documents, but authorities said there were technical problems that had to be overcome first.

This appears to have been resolved now as most recently the letters š and ž were added to č in the system.

Primorski Dnevnik quotes the example of Valentina Košuta, a member of the Slovenian minority, who on receiving her new passport in early January found the caron was missing in her surname.

Both her and the newspaper pointed the mistake out to the local police authorities because the parity board assured the minority in November that the technical problems pertaining to Slovenian diacritics had been resolved.

The authorities in Trieste confirmed that š and ž were indeed left out when some diacritics were added, of which they alerted the authorities in Rome.

Last week, Košuta received a certified e-mail from the Trieste Questura informing her that the diacritic in her surname had been included in the passport printing system and she can book an appointment to obtain a new passport with her family name printed correctly.