A total of 10 720 court cases were withdrawn in 2006 because of expired statute of limitations, Deputy Prosecutor-General Valeri Purvanov told Bulgarian-language daily Trud on March 19.
For 2007, I expect the number to exceed 10 000 cases, Purvanov said.
In total, over the past 35 years, Bulgarias legal system has withdrawn 762 809 cases, Purvanov said. Most of the cases date from the past 17 years of democracy.
This notable number means that justice has been denied to more than 700 000 Bulgarians throughout the years. In many of the 10 720 cases in 2006, investigations were launched against more than one person, which easily made the number of people who saw justice bypass them close to 20 000. By finding any number of shortcomings in court procedures, a prosecutor can easily delay a case until it reaches the limit of its statute of limitations. After that, the court can only apply the law and declare the case closed.
According to Purvanov, another reason for the poor results of Prosecutor-Generals Office was the changes in the constitution that started in 1991, soon after the fall of communism.
That was the time when the Prosecutor-Generals Office was left as the the only institution in the country that could investigate cases. All pre-trial cases were sent to the respective prosecutors who did not have the resources to work on them, Purvanov said.
In Petrich, for example, there was a time when one prosecutor was working on 1500 cases.
Before the 2003 amendments to the constitution, prosecutors possessed immunity against any legal proceedings. This was another reason prosecutors had not been investigated in the past for delaying cases. Until 2003, the law said that prosecutors could not be fired or replaced.
Speaking on private national channel Nova Televisia on March 20, Purvanov said that the question of punishing prosecutors was controversial. The law provided that sanctions could be imposed on prosecutors only within two years from the start of a case. This means that action could be taken only against prosecutors who had worked on cases within the past two years, since most of the withdrawn cases had a two-year statute of limitation.
Sadly, we cannot do anything about cases withdrawn before that, because this is what the law says, Purvanov told Nova Televisia.
There is a solution to the problem. It is called an integrated information system that can allow people and the media to monitor how cases are advancing from one institution to another, Purvanov said.
At the end of 2006, it was announced that the system will be functional by the end of 2007. Unfortunately, according to Purvanov, this deadline will not be met.
It is a simple reason: a lack of money for the equipment and the training of the staff, he said. The Supreme Judicial Council, the institution that approves the expenses of the Prosecutor-Generals Office, said that there was no money for such a project this year.
They even asked my why I spent close to 500 leva on hardware and I will probably be under further investigation, Purvanov said.
As The Sofia Echo reported last October, such a monitoring system already exists in several regional Bulgarian courts, such as the Varna regional and district courts. It was implemented with the assistance of the United States Agency for International Development.
Purvanov refused to say why the data about the withdrawn cases was not released earlier. On March 19, Interior Minister Roumen Petkov told Trud that he has been worrying about the withdrawn cases for the past six months and that Purvanovs interview was a brave step for the Prosecutor-Generals Office.
It demonstrates the Prosecutor-Generals Offices will to change, Petkov said. Purvanov did not answer when asked if the data could have cost Bulgaria its January 1 2007 European Union membership, or a safety clause on justice at the very least.
A day after Purvanovs interview with Troud, Prosecutor-General Boris Velchev said that he would do everything necessary to punish the responsible prosecutors under his command. A special group of top prosecutors will investigate why the cases had not been processed, Velchev told Trud.We will strengthen control at all levels of the Prosecutor-Generals Offices, so that prosecutors would not even think of delaying their work on the cases, Velchev said.
