„I was declared by everyone to be the main person responsible and to blame for everything. Judicial reform went to the dustbin. The name of the trash can is Nikola Filchev“.
This was stated in the show “This Saturday” the resigned chairman of “Yes, Bulgaria“ Hristo Ivanov, after yesterday the Constitutional Court (CS) annulled part of the latest changes in the Constitution, affecting the part with judicial reform.
„Filchev is a model. It became clear to him the complete insanity of concentrating so much power in one person at the top of a repressive institution, such as the prosecutor's office, and at the same time not having any possibility of control over this figure,“, added Ivanov.
According to him, no such model exists anywhere in the world.
There are models where the prosecution is centralized, but there it is always placed under clear democratic and civil control by the political system. Or the prosecutor's office is decentralized so that so much power cannot be concentrated in one hand”, he commented.
“In Bulgaria, there is a model that is unprecedented, and which the Constitutional Court announced as an element of our state structure. Actually, the SC said that Bulgaria is a prosecutorial republic. At last this thing was acknowledged. But we like this thing, regardless of the fact that this state of affairs violates European standards and recommendations, added Hristo Ivanov.
“Just a day before this famous decision, a European Commission report came out, on which billions depend. Constitutional judges find it so important to preserve the Filchev model that they threatened Bulgaria's integration into Schengen, because a key argument for being admitted to the Schengen area was precisely this constitutional change. They threaten European funding. But that doesn't matter at all to them, because it's about a huge power“, he also said.
My fight is not in vain. On the contrary. It was proved how important it was, because if these changes did not interfere with the Constitution, they would not be repealed. The fact that they were canceled in this way is the proof of how big a problem there is,”, commented Ivanov.
“All the changes that were aimed at bringing the Bulgarian court structurally into line with European standards of independence were canceled in order to preserve the lack of control of the chief prosecutor and his omnipotence. This happened, referring to an extremely controversial decision of the Constitutional Court from 2003, pronounced at Filchev's request. Everyone knows that he wrote this decision”, he specified.