Cooperation with international human rights treaty bodies
Bulgaria’s cooperation with the international human rights treaty bodies remained very poor in 2009. Bulgaria is overdue in submitting many reports to different UN treaty bodies. The latest final conclusions for the country on a report submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee date back to 1993, those of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women – to 1998, of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – to 1999, and of the Committee Against Torture – to 2004. In 2009, the government submitted reports to the Human Rights Committee, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Committee against Torture. Their review is pending.
In February, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) reviewed Bulgaria’s consolidated report, which was submitted with a great delay. A Bulgarian report was last reviewed by this committee in 1997. The new consolidated report was submitted after the committee initiated in February 2008 a country review in the absence of a state report, a mechanism that is extremely rarely resorted to and extremely inconvenient.
The committee expressed concern with regard to a series of issues related to the discrimination against ethnic minorities in Bulgaria, including:
- poor representation of ethnic minorities in governmental bodies;
- selective transfer of Roma children to special schools for children with developmental disabilities;
- discrimination against the Roma in employment, housing, healthcare and education;
- use of excessive force by law enforcement officials against Roma;
- spreading racist stereotypes and hostility against minorities by media and organizations, such as the Ataka party;
- poor knowledge and inadequate application by the judiciary bodies of the standards for the protection against racial discrimination.
The CERD recommendations did not result in a serious debate in Bulgarian society. None of the governments in power until the end of the year had introduced any measures to overcome the issues indicated. In some respects, the situation even worsened, for example as a result of the demolition of Roma houses in several Bulgarian cities.[1]
Failure to implement the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments remained a serious problem in 2009. By the end of the year, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe continued to monitor 154 ECHR judgments with regard to the implementation of the individual and general measures arising from them. The monitoring on some of these judgments dates back to the beginning of the century. Such is the case, for example, with the group of judgments Hasan and Chaush v. Bulgaria concerning state interference in the internal activities of religious communities; these decisions have been monitored since 2000. The monitoring on the group of judgments Velikova v. Bulgaria concerning the use of excessive force by police officers, resulting in some cases in murder during detention, also dates back to 2000. The group of decisions Al-Nashif v. Bulgaria concerning the deportation of foreigners as a threat to national security is being monitored since 2002.[2]
In March 2009, the Council of Ministers adopted a Concept Paper on Overcoming the Reasons Behind the Judgments Against the State of the European Court of Human Rights.[3] The document calls for a series of legislative and other measures that are supposed to deal with the violations established most often in ECtHR judgments against Bulgarian so far. These include:
- Implementation of an effective domestic legal means of protection against slow proceedings in civil and penal cases, by obliging the prosecution to provide the witnesses; more detailed description of prescriptive deadlines; introduction of common compulsory deadlines for preliminary detainment in all procedural phases; introducing an opportunity for the court of higher instance to issue instructions on the implementation of effective measures to accelerate the proceedings; establishing an administrative procedure for compensation in case of delayed proceedings;
- Amendment of Article 63, para. 2 of the Penal Proceedings Code, which regulates, when reviewing “guarded detention” measures, the grounds to decide whether there is a real danger of a person to abscond or to commit a crime; the purpose is to overcome the issue of excessive detention and the formalism in judging the lawfulness of such detention;
- Introduction of legal rules allowing a compensation for excessive detention under remand;
- Elimination of military courts, including by a Constitutional amendment, in order to make the investigation of cases of excessive use of force and firearms by police officers more effective;
- Revocation of some powers of the prosecution and establishment of effective judiciary control on its acts;
- Expansion of the scope and the comprehensiveness of judiciary control on acts of non-judiciary bodies, including in alien deportation cases;
- Expanding the possibilities for the enforcement of decisions against state bodies;
- Increasing the legal guarantees on the protection of ownership;
- Higher status and greater role of governmental agents who, apart from defending the state in applications before the ECtHR, should acquire training and coordinating functions and should be able to draft bills and submit them to the Council of Ministers;
- Enhancing the capacity of the state administration and that of the judiciary by trainings in ECHR case law.
The concept was promoted widely and sent to the National Assembly. However, by the end of 2009 none of its recommendations had been implemented.
[1] See Respect for private and family life, home and the correspondence below.
[2] For the requirements of the Council of Ministers and the government’s actions on these and other cases monitored by the Committee, see the respective chapters of the report below.
[3] Concept Paper on Overcoming the Reasons behind the Judgments Against the State of the European Court of Human Rights and on Solving the Problems Arising Thereof, adopted by Council of Ministers decision No. 144 of March 9, 2009, available online (in Bulgarian) at: http://www.justice.government.bg/new/Pages/Verdicts/Default.aspx.
