Suchergebnisse

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.

The ECtHR judgment in the case of the disciplinary proceedings against Bulgarian judge Miroslava Todorova attracted much attention. On the surface, it appears that the judgement is a mere example of the 'Justice delayed is justice denied' legal maxim – after all, the application was submitted in 2013 and the Court ruled against Bulgaria only in 2021. However, a closer look reveals that the ECtHR found in favor of Bulgaria on the two most worrisome questions – compatibility of the disciplinary proceedings against Todorova with Article 6 (fair trial) and Article 8 (right to private life) of the ECHR. This leads to the sad conclusion that unless a judge picks up a public fight with the government, she cannot defend herself before the ECtHR against bogus disciplinary proceedings. While judge Todorova tried to highlight some systemic issues of Bulgaria's justice system in her application, the ECtHR treated her case as an exception intimately tied to her role as president of a professional organization, and thus may have limited access to relief for other judges in similar circumstances.

In early June 2021, Bulgaria's Prosecutor's Office raided the Ministry of Interior and raised charges against a senior employee. According to the Minister of Interior Boyko Rashkov, the goal of the Prosecutor's Office is to sabotage an inquiry into illegal wiretapping. The senior employee who was charged indeed participated in the inquiry. A similar raid against the Bulgarian Presidency in July 2020 during which two of the President's advisors were arrested sparked mass protests demanding the resignation of both Borissov's government and General Prosecutor Ivan Geshev which lasted for months. Bulgaria's Prosecutor's Office is a Kafkaesque institution rather than a mere threat against the rule of law. Its crushing yet unrestrained authority is used as a weapon against the opponents of the status quo and a laundry detergent for corrupt politicians.