site.btaSupreme Judicial Council in Favour of Lifting EC Monitoring of Judicial System

Supreme Judicial Council in Favour of Lifting EC Monitoring of Judicial System

Sofia, January 12 (BTA) - The plenum of the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) Thursday adopted a proposal that the European Commission should lift its monitoring on Bulgaria's judicial system under the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM). The proposal was made by Nezabravka Stoeva of the SJC's prosecutors college.

Stoeva argued that in the ten years since the monitoring began, Bulgaria has kept amending its legislation and even its Constitution, but nothing has happened other than that the magistrates cannot keep abreast of the revisions to implement them.

The SJC voted 13 in favour and five against. Prosecutor General Sotir Tsatsarov backed the proposal, while Supreme Court of Cassation President Lozan Panov was against.

The SJC's representative member Dimiter Ouzounov was mandated to express the Council's position against further monitoring at Friday's meeting with Paraskevi Michou, Deputy Secretary-General at the European Commission, responsible for CVM. The meeting will be attended by Panov and Tsatsarov.

At the latest meeting on CVM with European Commission experts late last November the SJC argued that the monitoring of the judiciary should be lifted.

Also on Thursday, the SJC voted 13-8 against a proposal by judge Kalin Kalpakchiev to invite Romanian prosecutors to train Bulgarian magistrates how to fight high-level corruption. Most SJC members argued that Bulgarian magistrates would feel underrated if Romanian prosecutors were invited as their mentors, all the more so because the Romanian anti-corruption model has been criticized for its tendency to degenerate into a witch-hunt.