THE BULGARIAN LEGAL SYSTEM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80-00810A003700270008-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 28, 2009
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: March 3, 1954
• Content Type: REPORT

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CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
INFORMATION REPORT
t SJ IE` 9
This Document contains information affecting the Na-
tional Defense of the United States, within the mean-
ing of Title 18, Sections 793 and 794, of the U.S. Code, as
amended. Its transmission or revelation of its contents
to or receipt by an unauthorized person is prohibited
by law. The reproduction of this form is prohibited.
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COUNTRY Bulgaria
SUBJECT The Bulgarian Legal System
DATE OF INFO.
PLACE ACQUIRED
REPORT
DATE DISTR. 3 March 1954
NO. OF PAGES 5
REQUIREMENT NO. RD
REFERENCES
THE SOURCE EVALUATIONS IN THIS REPORT ARE DEFINITIVE.
THE APPRAISAL OF CONTENT IS TENTATIVE.
(FOR KEY SEE REVERSE)
The Prosecutor and his Assistants
1. Article 62 of the Bulgarian constitution declares the prosecutor to be the
highest authority to enforce compliance with the law by citizens and state
officials. Article 63 designates the state attorney general as the supreme
prosecutor and states that he is to be elected by Parliament for five years.
All other prosecutors are responsible only to their superiors, and the top
prosecutors are responsible only to the state attorney general.
2. The prosecutor controls the execution of the law, of government orders, of
internal instructions of the collective farms (TKZS), of ordinances of the
Council of Ministers, and of ordinances of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party. He supervises arrests., detentions, execution of court
sentences, and follows the course of the processes. He is authorized to
request documents from both civilians and government offices when he deems
such documents necessary for investigation of their actions. He can inter-
vene in private lawsuits in the name of the public interest and, in such
cases, the suit cannot be settled by agreement between the two parties.
3. The office of the state attorney general (Prokuratura) is unified and
centralized. It includes the office of the military prosecutor (Voenna
Prokuratura), the office of the military prosecutor of the Ministry of the
Interior (Prokuratura M.V.R.), and the office of the prosecutor for trans-
port cases.
11.. The military prosecutor of the Ministry of Defense is ranked as a deputy
attorney general and is assisted by district prosecutors as the need arises.
Military prosecutors, their deputies., military investigators, legal super-
visors, chief justices of military courts of the first grade, and members
of these courts must be graduates of law schools. They are all legal officers
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STATEEV
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and components of the legal section of the Army. Military prosecutors are
responsible for service personnel and for civilians who work under Army
control. They are further empowered to demdnd explanations from civilians
in any matter which concerns Army interests or Army regulation.
5. The office of the military prosecutor in the Ministry of the interior is
a central authority, competent for the entire country. The military prose-
cutor may appoint., with the approval of the Minister of the Interior., prose-
cutors for certain parts of the country,, irrespective of the administrative
divisions of the state administration, or for certain departments of the
office, corresponding to military units.
6. The office of the prosecutor for transport cases does not have an independent
chief prosecutor. Prosecutors and investigators are assigned., based on the
budget of the Ministry of Transport,, in the organization plan of the Prokura-
tura. The state attorney general is also chief of this office.
Legal officers of the Army and of the Ministry of the Interior., prosecutors
excepted., are appointed by the Presidium of the Parliament on recommendation
by the Minister of Defense or Minister of the Interior respectively.
8. The constitution specifies that the prosecutor must give written instructions
for execution of a legal investigations however., in practice., investigations
are made before receipt of instructions. The Militia and the Army must notify
the prosecutor of each case of detention not later than L8 hours after occur-
rence, and the prosecutor must immediately confirm or cancel the detention.
He can confirm it for investigative purposes for two weeks and, if this is
not sufficient, can extend it an additional month. All material resulting
from an investigation is forwarded to the prosecutor for examination and
initiation of a criminal file, if the latter is necessary.
9. Ordinary courts include People's courts, district courts, and the Supreme
Court of Bulgaria. In practice., there are only two instances of juris-
diction for each cases a verdict by a People's court can be appealed to
the district court, but a verdict by a district court can be appealed to
the Supreme Court only through the "revision" process, which rdquires sub-
mission of new evidence and is limited to a purely legal examination of the
previous verdict. If the Supreme Court finds that new proceedings are
necessary., it sends the case back to the district court or to the People's
court for renewal of proceedings under different judges.
10. Judges and members of courts must be graduates of law schools and have
passed the state examinatioras they must not have been fascists or adver-
saries of the present regimes they must not have been sentenced to imprison-
ment for political or criminal offenses. Members of an Army military court
must all, be at least one rank higher than the accused, unless the latter is
of general rank. Every official of the Ministry of the Interior is quali-
fied to serve as a member of the military court of that ministry.
11. Special courts include military courts, the military court of the Ministry
of the Interior, and the court for transport cases. The military courts
are located at various places in the country., and the military court of
the Ministry of the Interior,is located in Sofia. Additional courts may
be instituted at other places upon joint instructions from the Ministry of
Justice and the Ministry of the Interior. The court for transport cases is
located in Sofia.
12. Judges are appointed as f ollowso
a. Judges and court members of People's courts are elected by popular vote
for three year,,.
b. Judges and court members of district courts are elected by the district
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council for five years o
c. Judges of the Supreme Court are elected by Parliament for five years.
d. Notaries public and judges of the execution department are appointed by
the Minister of Justice.
12. The composition of all ordinary and special courts in all first instances of
jurisdiction, Supreme Court excepted, is one judge and two other court members.
The Supreme Court is composed of a president, two judges, and four court
members. In the second instance of jurisdiction, following an appeal or
"revision," the district courts and the Supreme Court are composed of three
judges.
13. Before dealing with any case the court concerned must hold a preliminary
session to decide if the case is to be tried at all. These preliminary
sessions enable the judges and the prosecutor to decide upon the course of
the trial and to correct and adapt all necessary details for either condem-
nation or acquittal of the accused. The practice of preliminary sessions
is one of the most important of the Bulgarian legal system and is modeled
after the Soviet pattern. The composition of a preliminary session in a
People's court is one judge and two court members. In all other courts only
three judges participate.
14.
Judicial Competences of the Special Courts
The military courts of the Ministry of Defense are competent for all offenses
by military personnel and by civilians who are working for the Army and receiving
pay and instructions from the Army, if such offenses are regarded as military.
If the offense is not considered military, the case is transferred to a civilian
court; in practice,, however, each Army employee is judged by the military courts.
The military courts are also competent for civilians who are accused of:
a. Sabotage against military installations,
b. Undermining of Army discipline or morale,
c. Violating the integrity of the Army in any way, and
d. Offenses committed in collaboration with Army personnel.
Military courts base judgments on the military Penal Code and supplementary
special laws.
15. The military court of the Ministry of the Interior is competent for offenses
committed by officials and employees of the Ministry and for civilians whose
acts interfere with the status, task, and integrity of all the quasi-military
formations of the Ministry of the Interior (Militia, plain-clothes security
personnel, Border Guards, and other special forces).
16. The court for transport cases is competent for all transport employees and
workers who are charged with offenses against the work, the safety of the
roads, the work discipline, and the government of Bulgaria or "socialism."
This court is further competent for all civilians who collaborate with
transport employees in such offenses.
Attorneys
According to the Bulgarian constitution, anyone who has graduated from a
law school and who has passed the state examination and required work period
can be an attorney, provided that he has not been deprived of his political
ri its. The situation in practice is quite different. There are now in
Sofia approximately 1,250 attorney., organized in collectives, who believe
that shortly an ordinance will be promulgated which will prohibit approxi-
mately 40 percent of them from continuing in their profession. Those ex-
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eluded will probably be forced to work as clerks.
18. The attorneys' collectives have from 15 to 50 members, and the managing council
of the collective has from five to 15 members, depending upon the size of the
collective. Anyone who wishes to consult an attorney must make his request
through the collective's secretary, who then assigns an attorney to deal with
the problem. In practice, the client still selects the attorney; if he is
assigned any attorney except the one he wants, he will simply turn to another
collective. Payment for legal assistance is paid only to the collective's
secretary. An attorney who has not worked during the designated pay period
does not receive any money from the collective, but he is debited with the
membership fee for the collective and with taxes. From earnings up to 1,000
leva each attorney receives 55 percent of the fees for his work, and the
remainder is retained for taxes, membership fees, and other expenses. From
earnings above 1,000 leva each attorney receives only 35 percent of the fees
paid for his work.
19. The Ministry of Justice is responsible for supervising attorneys' work. Any
attorney who blunders or takes money privately, a practice which most attorneys
follow, is subject to punishment, theoretically at least..
20. All attorneys have theoretically equal rights under the constitution; in prac-
tice, however, not all attorneys can appear before the special courts. This
distinction is rigidly enforced, and the attorneys themselves do not like to
mention it.
Communist and Soviet Influence on Bulgarian Law
21. Bulgarian courts are publicly stressed as "law courts of a class - of the
workers' class, of the proletariat." Professor Stefan Pavlov, chair for
criminal law at Sofia University, states in his Criminal Law of the Republic
of Bulgaria:
"The aim of this book is to explain and to state
clearly that. our law is Marxian in character, communal-
political, a class law."
While it is true that judges are elected, the absolute Communist majority in
all councils and commissions makes it impossible to elect a non-Communist.
22. Bulgarian law makes it formally possible for the Communist Party to dominate
the judiciary, as evidenced in Paragraph 2 of the "Bill of Contracts and
Debts"s
"The decisions of the judge must be logical, and if
in any particular case the law is not clear, it must
be interpreted in a spirit corresponding to the demands
of the socialist community. If there is no such possi-
bility, the verdict must be based on the fundamentals
of socialist law."
The concept of "demands of the socialist community" has been taken from
Paragraph 130 of the Soviet constitution.
23. The majority of legal textbooks used in law schools are translations of Soviet
textbooks, include the following:
a. Soviet Civil Law by Gankin, Bartos, Lunz, and Novitski
b. Marriage and and The Soviet Family by Sverdlov
c. Civil Procedure by Chaparski, Abramov, and Shkodin
d. History of the State and the Law by Galneza, Kachanan, and others
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d. The Purpose of Science in Soviet Law by Vyshinsky.
Miscellaneous Information
2L1.. Secret Instructions (Poveritelni Posstanovlenia), issued by the Council of
Ministers, bear decisively at times upon the course of a trial. Although
not promulgated in the Official Gazette, these Instructions have legal
validity. All prosecutors are notified of these Instructions, but not the
judge of the People's or district court. Although such instructions deal
generally with particular plants and factories, they may have also a wider
meaning. In April 1953, the Official Gazette announced that a workers'
divided (Trudova Dividenda) would be paid to the workers at leather fac-
tories and that the dividend would amount to 50 percent of the total profit.
The dividend was paid, but in September 1953 the matter was reconsidered,
with the result that all recipients of the dividend were asked to refund
20 percent. No one did so. In late November 1953, criminal proceedings
were opened against all concerned, and the first cases were heard in early
December 1953. The prosecutors informed the court members and the counsels
for defense that a Secret Instruction, cited by date and number, reduced
with retroactive force the dividend from 50 percent to 30 percent.
25. A special card, sometimes called "Legal Identity Card,".is prepared for
every person who appears as the accused before Bulgarian courts. The
card contains a great many personal details about the accused, his family
up to his grandparents, their occupations, their party affiliations, and
his own party affiliation. This card is a decisive factor in the attitude
of the presiding judge and court members toward the accused.
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