The plenum of the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) left without consideration the proposal of the acting Minister of Justice Andrey Yankulov to appoint a new temporary chief prosecutor to replace Borislav Sarafov. The majority of the judicial personnel officers considered that only the Prosecutorial College of the council was competent to deal with this issue and therefore decided to forward Yankulov's request to it.
The council meeting lasted nearly 6 hours amid a protest against Sarafov, which began on Thursday morning in front of the SJC building. Subsequently, the demonstrators moved to the Courthouse and attempted to storm the office of the Prosecutor General, which provoked a clash with the court security.
"Borislav Sarafov's mandate as acting Prosecutor General may turn out to be practically indefinite", is the opinion of Judge Atanaska Disheva, a member of the Supreme Judicial Council's panel of judges.
“There is a different interpretation of this issue. My personal position is that a new acting Prosecutor General, different from Mr. Sarafov, should have been appointed by July 21 last year, according to the new text of the Judicial Power Act of January last year, which states that a person may temporarily hold the position for no more than 6 months. And this was the reason why the panel of judges appointed a new acting President of the Supreme Administrative Court. The position of the prosecutor's college is that this position is inapplicable precisely with regard to Mr. Sarafov, because he was in the so-called "status quo", she explained in an interview with BNT.
„The end was foreshadowed. I was not surprised by the opinions of my colleagues. The debate was expected, as was the result. This discussion was the only way for the members of the judicial college to express their position, since when Mr. Sarafov was appointed in June 2023, the discussion was limited to the prosecutor's college," the judge commented.