Suchergebnisse

The European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) has just celebrated the third anniversary of the start of its operations. "I am sure you will soon see [the EPPO] is anything but a 'toothless tiger'", said Laura Kövesi in an interview in 2021. Sadly, in Bulgaria, a country frequently shaken by scandals implicating abuses of EU funds and known for rampant corruption, the EPPO reminds of a domesticated rather than a fierce wild cat.

By 1 April 2018, member states had to transpose an EU Directive on 'the strengthening of certain aspects of the presumption of innocence and of the right to be present at the trial in criminal proceedings'. Bulgaria has not fully transposed it to this day, and consistently undermines it. Now, finally, the Commission has launched infringement proceecings. Preceding the announcement, the Commission rejected Rasosveta Vassileva's reasoned complaints on the same issue, as late as 2022. Her odyssey is a concerning tale on how EU institutions handle citizen alerts.

Recent events in Bulgaria have brought the true extent of its rule of law decay to the fore. The wars between the highest-ranking prosecutors in the country, public testimonies by participants in crime syndicates implicating senior magistrates and politicians, and the brutal murders of potential witnesses against organized crime demonstrate that the line between organized crime, the judiciary, and the political apparatus is increasingly difficult to draw. In this post, I argue that the current escalation of Bulgaria's rule of law crisis lays bare the European Commission's continued mismanagement of the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM).

On 14 April 2022 Bulgaria's Parliament adopted legislative amendments to the Law on the Judiciary and related legislation to finally put an end to the Specialized Criminal Court, acting as a first and second instance, and its mirroring Specialized Prosecutor's Office. Both institutions were set up during Boyko Borissov's first term as Prime Minister in 2011 and severely undermined the rule of law in Bulgaria. Regrettably, the creation and development of these specialized structures was encouraged and marked as progress in the reports by the European Commission under the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) on Bulgaria. This inconsistency calls into question the European Commission's ability to objectively monitor the rule of law in its Member States, to recognize threats, and to give adequate recommendations.