Bulgaria: Promoting Prosecutorial Accountability

Background

In Bulgaria, the office of the Prosecutor General, the country’s highest prosecutor, is endowed with broad and extensive powers. Yet neither the office nor the prosecution service as a whole exercises power in an accountable and transparent manner. The office of the Prosecutor General is closed to any form of parliamentary or public scrutiny. It is not obliged to report on its activities and, besides publishing statistics on cases prosecuted, does not do so. Not surprisingly, allegations of mismanagement, nepotism and corruption within the prosecution service are rife. As a result public confidence in Bulgaria’s prosecutors is extremely low.

This situation is aggravated by the hierarchical and centralized nature of the Bulgarian prosecution service. The Prosecutor General has the power to interfere in the decision-making of individual prosecutors and may intervene in the prosecution of individual cases. The Prosecutor General enjoys life tenure and immunity from criminal prosecution; he further exercises complete control over the career development of prosecutors. Together, these factors severely impede the independence of individual prosecutors in Bulgaria.

The lack of accountability of the Bulgarian prosecution service has resulted in a poorly performing and inefficient institution. The lack of standards and performance criteria, together with a non-transparent selection and promotion process, have resulted in a sluggish organization, generally unsuccessful in the prosecution of serious crime.

An April 2003 Bulgarian Constitutional Court decision further entrenched the independence of the Prosecutor’s General office (click here for an unofficial translation). As a result significant legal reform of the office of the Prosecutor General is unlikely within the next year or two. The intervening period provides an opportunity to examine and compare models for this important institution, in order to be fully prepared when the opportunity for reform reappears.

Objectives

The objective of the project is to provide impetus for reform of the Prosecutor General’s office and to act as a catalyst in bringing about a more accountable and transparent prosecution service. This will be achieved by developing well-researched recommendations on how such a reform process should proceed and on what criteria it can be based. The recommendations will be shaped by Bulgarian actors so as to inform the local decision process in an appropriate and contextualized manner.

Activities

The focus of the project is the publication of a research report exploring models of prosecutorial accountability and independence in eight countries. The report is intended as a tool for initiating and sustaining debate on prosecutorial reform in Bulgaria by engaging, among others, reform-minded politicians, criminal justice practitioners, academics and journalists. The Justice Initiative and the Open Society Foundation—Sofia are commissioning a number of legal experts both within and outside Bulgaria to conduct comparative research on prosecution services in the following countries: France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.

For each selected country, experts will explore the national prosecution service’s organizational structure, the laws and regulations determining its powers and duties, and the relationship between the prosecution service and other state institutions. Particular attention will be given to the mechanisms governing the accountability and independence of the prosecution services.

Once the country-specific research has been completed, the experts in consultation with other legal specialists, policy makers and senior criminal justice personnel, will identify a range of appropriate and effective mechanisms for ensuring prosecutorial accountability in a democratic setting. Comparative analysis will permit the development of criteria for selecting models and institutional structures appropriate to a more accountable and transparent prosecution service in Bulgaria.

Partner

Open Society Foundation—Sofia

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