The ruling party Gerb has surprisingly announced that consultations will open next week with all parliamentary groups aimed to forge consensus over constitutional amendments regarding judicial system reform. One point of discussion is to split the Supreme Judicial Council into two chambers – one of the judges and the other of prosecutors. In other plans the Prosecutor General should routinely report to parliament. Intentions to reform SJC have been in the air for ten years and are hardly a surprise. What is surprising is that until recently the Ministry of Justice maintained the view that such reforms would be possible without the need to amend the Constitution. Now the ruling party has concluded that without amendments to the Constitution the reform would end up incomplete, and this is right. However, a few public statements made clear that there were no plans to have those amendments passed by a Grand National Assembly. This implies that relationships between the bodies of the judicial system are not going not change and that only the system of its administration will - aimed at more effective jurisdiction.
Plans also include changes in the internal structure of the Judiciary meant to renew its staff. Further, a possible cut in the term of the Supreme Judicial Council is counted on to avoid the emergence of a bureaucratic class in the judicial system whose members are irreplaceable administrators throughout their careers. In all likelihood all political groups will accept SJC reforms, however the biggest players – Gerb, the Bulgarian Socialist Party and the predominantly Turkish DPS (Movement for Rights and Freedoms) - will handle matters with utmost care so as to be able to keep their positions in the judicial system intact.
MPs from almost all parliamentary groups have openly admitted that they do not expect to see any radical changes in the way the judicial system operates based on that the biggest political parties maintain their lobbies there and won’t benefit from reforming it. So let us see how this commendable initiative insistently demanded by the European Commission for quite some time, will turn out at the upcoming negotiations and after they are over.
English Daniela Konstantinova
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