The first vote on the bill to amend and supplement the Civil Procedure Code, held in the National Assembly, was met with sharp criticism, serious legal arguments and serious questions about the legitimacy and motives behind the so-called judicial mediation.
The meeting was also attended by the Minister of Justice from GERB, who defended the bill, while from the rostrum, the MPs from the parliamentary group of “Vazrazhdane“ Petar Petrov and Tsveta Rangelova objected to some of the proposed texts, warning that they circumvent a decision of the Constitutional Court and push through mandatory mediation under a new, more acceptable name.
Tsveta Rangelova described the bill as another legislative injection in the interest not of citizens, but of certain organizations and “convenient trainers“, aimed at absorbing funds, not at real reform of the judicial system.
“We no longer call it mandatory mediation, but judicial mediation, but you will see in the texts that in practice we are forcing the disputing parties in a pending proceeding to hold a mandatory mediation meeting. This is in practice mandatory mediation.“, Rangelova said at the beginning of her speech.
She turned to the Minister of Justice: “Mr. Minister, in the submitter's opinion you proudly stated that this bill is not being written for the sake of Brussels, but for the sake of the judicial system and Bulgarian citizens. But I think that either you have been misled, or you are wrong, or you would simply like to present it to the public in this way. Because we both know that the truth is completely different.“
Tsveta Rangelova added, that this amendment to the Civil Procedure Code has no real benefit for Bulgarian citizens.
„We will only serve some NGOs that have been absorbing money since 2023, conducting extremely frivolous training courses of the order of a few hours and producing mediators from people without legal education. It is even more absurd that the bill provides that they can even be spouses or relatives of one of the parties.“
The People's Representative did not fail to note that whenever a PP-DB minister has proposed something in the Recovery and Resilience Plan, „know that it is always about money.“
„There is no legal possibility where the parties voluntarily do not want to settle their relations out of court, for this to happen under institutional pressure. It is even more absurd when a person who does not want to take advantage of this voluntary way of settlement of the dispute, be fined, i.e. sanctioned for having chosen the legal path of conducting a court case.“, Rangelova also said.