site.btaJustice Minister: No Properly Structured Body Available to Deal with High-Level Corruption

Justice Minister: No Properly Structured Body Available to Deal with High-Level Corruption


Sofia, January 15 (BTA) - Talking to journalists in Parliament
on Thursday, Justice Minister Hristo Ivanov said Bulgaria has no
adequately structured body to deal with high-level corruption.
He added that the decisive steps of judicial reform should be
made by the year's end.

The anti-corruption body should have prosecuting and
investigative functions, and a special process of personnel
selection should rule out dependencies.

Ivanov said the mere replacement of some people with others in
the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) would not solve problems. The
very model of the SJC should be restructured instead.

The anti-corruption body which will tackle bad practices in
senior government is of key importance. An effective structure
of this kind is operable in Romania, whose political elite
managed to find the will for this. While Bulgaria has many
anti-corruption bodies, none of them has turned into the little
stone which could upset the cart in the higher echelons of
power, said Ivanov.

He noted the importance of the gradually improving performance
of the prosecuting magistracy. He emphasized that prosecutors
themselves had been suggesting reforms in their work. "The
reform cannot be postponed indefinitely through discussion,
clearly we must make the decisive steps by the year's end, for
which we will need to rally a majority and support," he said.

Ivanov said it was important that work was in progress on
certain ideas, so that the Judicial Power Act, the Code of Civil
Procedure and the Penal Code will be amended to increase the
effectiveness of the prosecutors' work.

The Justice Minister said the independence of the court should
be guaranteed, especially its independence of corruption and
political influence.

Ivanov expects the upcoming monitoring report of the European
Commission on justice and home affairs in Bulgaria to give a
true picture of the situation. The reform has stagnated in the
last few years, quite a few specific problems have surfaced, no
one is without guilt for the state of the judiciary, and the
report will take notice of it, said Ivanov.