Right to life
The right to life remained a serious problem in Bulgaria in 2009. Article 74 of the Ministry of the Interior Act, which allows the use of deadly firearms when detaining a person who is committing or has committed even a petty offense, was not amended. This regulation is inconsistent with Principle 9 of the United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. Many police officers who used deadly force in 2009 or in preceding years did so with impunity.
The pre-trial proceedings on the death of Boris Mihaylov, a Romani man from Samokov who was shot dead by a police officer in 2004,[1] were finally terminated. In November, the Sofia Military Court issued a decision that overruled the eighth decision of the Sofia Military District Prosecutor’s Office to terminate the investigation. The military court stated that the prosecutor did not conform to the court’s instructions to conduct an adequate investigation. On 17 December, however, the Military Court of Appeals overruled the Sofia Military Court decision and confirmed the Prosecutor’s Office decision to terminate the proceedings.
In August, the Sofia Military Court of Appeals convicted police officers to between 16 and 18 years of imprisonment for the murder of Angel ‘Chorata’ Dimitrov, carried out in November 2005 in Blagoevgrad.[2] When the verdict was announced, the minister of the interior, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, immediately stated that the officers had not intended to kill Chorata and that the verdict is unjust. Several hundred police officers protested in Blagoevgrad in support of their former colleagues. Officers in other places also expressed their protest. At the appeal at the Supreme Court of Cassation in December, both the lawyers of the defendants and those of the plaintiffs asked for a new review, albeit on different grounds. The court sustained this and returned the case for a new review by the Military Court of Appeals. Thus, in February 2010 this simple case, simple as it is in terms of facts, was subjected to a third review at an appellate instance, and four years after the incident the defendants are still not convicted.
In November, the Military Court of Appeals finally terminated the reopened investigation of the killing by a Bulgarian border policeman of Yalcin Erdzhan, a Turkish fisherman and a poacher shot dead in April 2008.[3] Initially, the border policeman was indicted. The indictment generated a wave of protests in the nationalist circles and the Burgas Municipal Council made the officer an honourable citizen. Following several terminations and resumptions, the Military Court of Appeals held that the use of firearms by the policeman had been lawful.
In 2009, the Sofia Military Court initiated a case with regard to Bashkim Marladzhaku, who was shot and died from his wounds. He was killed on 29 November 2008, in a planned police raid on Rozhen Boulevard in Sofia.[4] Initially, the military prosecutor terminated the case; later, upon appeal by Marladzhaku’s heirs, on 14 August 2009 the Sofia Military Court cancelled the termination and returned the case for further investigation. By the end of the year, it had not been reviewed in court.
In 2009, several people lost their lives in detention or due to the use of firearms by police officers. One of them, Plamen Kutsarov, died on 20 January while he was being transported in a police car, after being apprehended in a police raid. The information gathered during the investigation indicates that he was guarded by two teams of four officers from the detention unit. Later, two of them were indicted for murder by negligence. The coroner found five amphetamine pills in Kutsarov’s stomach. These were not dissolved, which means they were taken immediately before his death. Should premeditated murder be proven during the investigation, the indictments will be changed. At the time of Kutsarov’s detention, there was no arrest warrant for him and he wasn’t even mentioned as a witness. However, by the end of the year there were no verdicts on this case.
On 20 September 2009, a row at a crossroads in Burgas resulted in the murder of Kaloyan Stoyanov. He was shot three times by a former police officer. The latter was initially indicted under Article 118 of the Penal Code (murder under affectus); the indictment was later changed to Article 119 (murder while exceeding the limits of self-defence). Several organizations, public persons and media in Burgas initiated a series of protests, including the collection of signatures against the indictment of the former police officer. In October, a local newspaper announced that the regional governor, Konstantin Grebenarov, had also signed the petition. The Burgas District Court started the review of the penal case against the defendant in mid-February, but the hearing was postponed due to moves for examinations.
On 14 December 2009, a chase and an intensive shootout on the Trakia Highway resulted in the death of Dimitar ‘Bogrovetsa’ Mitrev. He was allegedly a member of a highway robbery gang and acted in complicity with two others. Pre-trial proceedings were initiated by the Sofia City Prosecutor’s Office. In February 2010, the prosecution informed the BHC that they have formulated their opinion on the case and that the pending decision will most probably be to terminate the proceedings as the use of firearms was lawful.
On 5 November 2009, the ECtHR announced its judgment on Kolevi v. Bulgaria. The court held a violation of several provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, including of Article 2 (right to life), with regard to the ineffective investigation of the murder of former deputy prosecutor general Nikolai Kolev. He was shot under unclear circumstances by contract killers in December 2002, after a conflict with then prosecutor general Nikola Filchev. The court held that the murder investigation, which failed to identify the perpetrators, had not taken into account the conflict between Kolev and Filchev and had not sought evidence for the involvement of the latter. The court found serious barriers to the investigation in the very constitutional and statutory structure of the prosecution in Bulgaria, which in effect makes the prosecutor general immune against penal proceedings.
During the year, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers continued to monitor the implementation of the individual and the general measures on cases, in which the ECtHR had in the past found violations of the right to life. The Committee of Ministers was not satisfied with the individual and the general measures on none of these cases. It required reopening of the investigations of cases involving loss of life during detention or as a result of excessive use of firearms by the police. The Bulgarian authorities announced that steps have been made to reopen some of the cases (Velikova v. Bulgaria, Nachova et al v. Bulgaria, 2005). In 2009, these new investigations produced no result. On several other cases, however (Angelova v. Bulgaria, 2002, Ognyanova and Choban v. Bulgaria, 2006), the authorities stubbornly maintained that the investigations had been conducted in compliance with the law and that no reopening was necessary. In these cases the ECtHR explicitly held that the investigations had been inadequate and that was deemed one of the reasons to establish a violation of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In addition, the Committee of Ministers required the Bulgarian government: to initiate measures to improve the initial and the follow-up training of police officers in the field of human rights; to improve procedural guarantees during detention, more specifically through more effective application of the provisions requiring detainees to be informed about their rights and about the formalities in the registration of the detention; to guarantee the independence of the investigation in cases of abuse by police officers. In 2010, the Committee of Ministers will continue to monitor the implementation of the individual and the general measures arising from these decisions.
[1] See BHC, Human Rights in Bulgaria in 2005, Annual Report of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, March, 2006, available online at: http://www.bghelsinki.org/upload/resources/Report2006-English.doc.
[2] See BHC, Human Rights in Bulgaria in 2004, Annual Report of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, March, 2005, available online at: http://www.bghelsinki.org/upload/resources/hr2005-en.doc.
[3] See BHC, Human Rights in Bulgaria in 2008, Annual Report of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, March, 2009, available online at: http://www.bghelsinki.org/upload/resources/Humanrights2008_en.pdf.
[4] Ibid.
