A draft bill on amnesty provides for close to 2000 prisoners to be set free.

The document was prepared by the Ministry of Justice and was presented to the Cabinet on January 17. 

Deputy Justice Minister Dimitar Bongalov gave a news conference on the Amnesty Bill, saying that it was linked to Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union.

The previous amnesty law in the country was adopted in late 1991.

Bongalov said that the bill would move swiftly and smoothly through the legislative process.

The Cabinet and the Ministry of Justice had granted well-founded amnesty petitions in strict compliance with the laws of the land, according to a statement by the ministry.

The organs of state would not bow to pressure and ultimatums but would continue to observe, just as they do now, national legal standards, the statement said.

Bongalov said that full amnesty would be granted for those currently serving light sentences. This means that minors who have less than a year to spend in prison as well as those serving sentences of a maximum of two years will get amnesty.

Amnesty will be given to mothers with three or more children and who were serving no more than three years imprisonment.

A total of about 1500 people are in these categories.

Other prisoners may pin their hopes on the newly adopted article 78 of the Penal Code, which gives a court the right to impose only financial penalties on people sentenced to up to three years in jail for deliberate crimes, with the exception of those convicted of conspiracy to murder or robbery, causing or inciting prostitution, as well as sexual offences against children aged under 14 years.

People sentenced to up to five years in jail for crimes of negligence will also be amnestied, the draft bill says.

The precondition for all groups of prisoners in all these categories is that they must be serving time for a first offence.

The ministry will propose to Parliament a further change. This change affects penalties received under article 354 of the Penal Code about drug trafficking and dealing in drugs. The ministry is proposing a partial amnesty for people sentenced for these offences.

Bongalov said that the reasoning for this was that since 2000, the penalties for such crimes had been amended several times and currently there were people in prison sentenced for the same crime but serving different sentences.

Criminals who serve the total amount of their sentences will be affected by the Amnesty Bill as well. As Bongalov described it to Bulgarian-language news website Mediapool, this will be a kind of a “jackpot”. The draft bill will make a small gesture to those sentenced for serious offences. Through these two changes, the total number of prisoners who will benefit from the new law will come to just more than 1800.

“From what we have seen so far from the Justice Ministry, I can say that their main goal is to clear out some of the jails in Bulgaria,” lawyer Dinko Kanchev of Bulgarian Lawyers for Human Rights told The Sofia Echo on January 23.

In general this was not a bad policy, Kanchev said, because Bulgarian jails were pretty much overcrowded. This had been one of their biggest problems through the years. Commenting on the statements by Bongalov, Kanchev said that the draft bill was in its first phase.

“It has to be approved by the Cabinet, then sent to Parliament, and then the real debate will start,” he said.

Kanchev said that in spite of some comments in the media, people need not worry too much about the setting free of some criminals.

“I see that they have set criteria and if everything goes well in Parliament, I do not think that the prisoners set free will be any serious threat to society,” he said.

Kanchev was surprised that the draft bill was said to be linked to Bulgaria’s accession to the EU.

“I have never seen such an obligation or connection to the EU membership of our country. We have a law on amnesty from 1991. This is not something new to our court system. In general, I think that the draft bill will bring more positive than negative changes to the situation of prisoners in Bulgaria. The truth is that it is too early to comment on it,” Kanchev said.

Indeed, prison conditions seem to be the main issue for many prisoners.

Coincidentally or not, the news about the draft bill was preceded by series of strikes in various prisons around the country. 

On January 15, a protest started in Vratsa prison in northern Bulgaria. Vratsa inmates started the protest with a hunger strike. The strike lasted four days and ended after prisoners sent a declaration to the management of the prison. In the declaration, prisoners said that they would end the hunger strike only after the relevant institutions responded to their demands. The prisoners demanded a law on amnesty, improvement of living conditions and abolition of the rule to count two workdays as three for working inmates serving sentences.

On January 18, Vratsa regional governor Antonio Georgiev told Bulgarian news agency BTA that 400 000 leva had been allocated in the national budget for an overhaul of the Vratsa prison building. The money will be used to improve living conditions and hygiene. A lavatory per each two cells will be built and inmates’ living conditions will be upgraded to meet European standards, Georgiev said.

Apparently communication was not among prisoners’ problems, because news about the Vratsa protests soon reached other prisons.

Soon afterwards, prisoners in Pleven and Varna took similar action in support of their “colleagues”. Although these protests did not last long, they showed that prisoners in Bulgaria are well informed about what is going on outside prison walls, and that the issue of the amnesty draft bill will attract a lot of attention from both law-makers and human rights watch groups.