Over the past seven years the efficiency of Bulgarian judiciary has gone considerably down, despite the increase of funds spent on it, was one of the conclusions of a World Bank report on the judiciary, announced on October 7 2008 in Sofia, Bulgarian-language Dnevnik daily said.

The report was presented by Justice Minister Meglena Tacheva.

Dnevnik quoted the report that in 2004 one judge was able to close 292 court cases, while in 2006 the number went down to 272.

Some courts in the country were overloaded with work but received minimum funding. Such was the case of Sofia Regional Court, which reviewed 13 per cent of all the cases in the country but receives less than one per cent of the overall funding.

The number of magistrates Bulgaria had was the average one in the other European Union countries but nevertheless Bulgarian courts dealt with more than the average for the EU court cases, the report said. To overcome this problem, the World Bank came up with a economical approach and suggested raising the cost of court fees that is supposed to bring the number of filed cases down.

Tacheva said that an increase will not happen soon because there had to be a though analyses of the situation. If anything, Bulgaria's efforts were in the opposite direction in bringing court fees down.