The gathering was called The open session of the Presidency of the Republican Conference of the League of Socialist Youth of Slovenia (RK ZSMS), as state authorities had banned the gathering. The declaration was published in the daily newspaper Delo on 10 May 1989.

The name of the document, the May Declaration, was taken from the famous declaration by Dr Anton Korošec from 1917 which called for the unification of all South Slavic nations in one political state unit and announced the end of the Habsburg Empire and the creation of Yugoslavia.

The political document from 1989, however, announced the breakup of Yugoslavia and the beginning of independent Slovenia.

The declaration consisted of three substantive points: the first expressed the people's determination to live in a sovereign state of the Slovenian nation, the second was a demand that Slovenia as a sovereign state should be able to independently decide on the connections with South Slavic and other nations within a renewed Europe, and the third point stated that, with regard to the historical efforts of the Slovenian nation to achieve political independence, the Slovenian state could only be based on the respect for human rights and freedoms, on democracy including political pluralism and on a society providing spiritual and material prosperity in accordance with the available natural resources and the human abilities of the citizens of Slovenia.

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