There are lawyers who are requesting to be removed from the National Register for legal aid. One of the reasons is the low amount of remuneration.
This is what Nataliya Ilieva, the chairman of the National Legal Aid Bureau, told BTA.
The Ministry of Justice proposed an increase in legal aid fees about a month ago. The published changes see the lowest legal aid fees doubling and the highest and most recently updated in 2021 fees increasing by 26%. For the rest, the inflation rate will be applicable, respectively studied as of 2009 and 2015.
According to Ilieva, the amount of remuneration is not the only reason why lawyers make a request for their removal from the National Register of Legal Aid.
At the moment, their refusals do not hinder the operation of the system, because we constantly receive applications for entry into the register. At the moment, 6,671 lawyers are registered in the National Register for Legal Aid, Nataliya Ilieva also pointed out.
She recalled that a working group led by the Deputy Minister of Justice, Spaska Kincheva, had developed a project to change the regulation on the payment of legal aid. The changes cover the Ordinance on new types of legal aid introduced with the amendments to the Law on Legal Aid from December 2022. These are changes that were made in connection with the Recovery and Resilience Plan, Ilieva said. According to her, another part of the reforms are in the direction of every single remuneration with the amount of inflation for the period since their last change.
There are rewards that have been changed by almost 100 percent and there are those that have been changed in 2021 and they are with a smaller percentage. All percentages are different because the inflation rate was applied during the calculation, Ilieva pointed out.
She recalled that legal aid fees were increased once in -2015, and only some of them, as well as a second time in 2020 - almost all fees, but only their maximums. The increase was by 40 percent in criminal cases and by 20 percent in civil cases, Natalia Ilieva said.