Supreme Magistrates of Bulgaria

The interviews were made within the information-educational campaign The Court and We of the Club Journalists Against Corruption with the support of the Strengthening of the Judiciary Project of the Agency for State Internal Control

Blagovest Punev, Vice President of the Supreme Court of Cassation, head of the Civil College

Mr. Punev, could you tell us about the Civil College with the Supreme Court of Cassation?
Legal proceedings in Bulgaria have been three-instance since the reform of 1997. The Civil College with the Supreme Court of Cassation considers cases as a regular and obligatory third instance, which is the last and decisive instance when dealing with civil litigations. The Supreme Court of Cassation is regular because it controls each case which has been heard at first instance by a court of appeal, when a decision is made and is not cancelled legislatively through a cassation appeal. It is also obligatory because if the hearing of a certain civil litigation is not excluded from the cassation control, the ruling on it may be appealed against before a cassation instance. Unlike most courts of cassation abroad, we do not have the power to select the cases to be brought in. We must consider every claim, which is admissible, regardless of its justness.

So, the college hears cases concerning the citizens?
Yes. We hear the most popular litigations. The Civil College consists of five sections. The first one deals with partition litigations – partitions between co-owners of inherited property or between divorced spouses. The second section decides obligation litigations – mainly contracts and their satisfaction, claims related to the Family Code and personal claims to do with the Persons and Family Act. The third section specializes in labor litigations, and the fourth – which was further divided into subsections A and B due to the tremendous work-load – in ownership litigations and restitution proceedings.

How many cases are brought before the Civil College per year?
The forty judges within the Civil College decide 12,000 cases a year, which means that every judge closes some 300 cases per year. The cases which are pending are about as many.

How do you handle the great bulk of cases? Does it not lead to a serious staying of the proceedings?
According to the law, judgment must be delivered within a month, following the hearing, but the problem of staying proceedings arises from the setting down for trial. Due to the great number of cases there is a long delay between the moment a case is brought before court and setting down for trial. When dealing with labor litigations the delays may reach up to two years and a half even though such litigations must be settled much faster, as they are related to the right to work of the plaintiffs, their means of living. In fact, such litigations become pointless because they remain pending for so long at the Supreme Court of Justice.

Is it obligatory for each labor case to be tried in the third instance or is it only done as an exception?
For a long time we have had the idea of selecting the cases which are brought before a court of the last instance. But the decision to do it must be made by our legislators. The organization of legal proceedings and cassation review need be amended – the Supreme Court of Cassation must no longer function as a third regular and obligatory instance, and legal proceedings must become two-instance, where the decisions of the second instance will become operative and enforceable, the way it used to be before 1990. The Supreme Court of Cassation must only function as an extraordinary instance, hearing only a selection of cases, instead of delivering judgment on every complaint. If this happens, the only cases heard by the Supreme Court of Cassation will be those, whose decisions have been cancelled, or in other words – about 25 percent of the cassation complaints brought in, which will reduce our work-load from 12,000 cases a year to a mere three to four thousand. We need some kind of filter to make preliminary assessments of the admissibility of the complaints and reject those which are unfounded and will not be heard.

The jam at the moment obstructs the timely settling of significant litigations, and does not allow the Supreme Court to perform its constitutionally defined function – to unify jurisprudence – because it is not just a decisive high instance, but also has the very important function to standardize the holding of the courts. The SCC must not pass controversial judgments, because this violates the fundamental principle of equality of citizens in the eye of the law.

The draft of a new Civil Procedure Code is currently drawn. Do you think it will provide for such changes?
Indeed, the Draft is being drawn at present, but whether it will be adopted by Parliament and enforced, only time will show.

The Journalists against Corruption Club will implement a project with the support of the US Agency for International Development and part of it deals with the strengthening of the judiciary. Its aim is to better inform the Bulgarian citizens of the work of court and their rights. What needs to be done to strengthen our judiciary?
First, I think that the term “reform” is very pompous. This is not a reform, because it will not give us anything we have not seen before. It seems to me that things are much simpler, but hard to put into practice. We need qualified staff, well-trained professional magistrates and good administration of the courts – it is quite unsatisfactory at the moment – I mean the management of cases, their timely setting down for trial and the control over their movement. We also need standardized periods for hearing of the various cases, depending on their matter, as well as the number of judges and staff who deal with each category of cases. We lack these things – statistics are not being kept and standards have not been established. The US Agency for International Development organizes training programs for judges in the USA, where they get acquainted with the local court administration. The US National Center for Case Administration monitors cases on a national level through a computerized network, which makes it possible to control the movement of each case, check whether the average deadlines are being kept, and measure the delay between the moment a claim or a complaint is lodged in court and the moment the instance in question comes to a decision. Our American colleagues have a uniform system of standards, which they observe. Actually, the tardiness of legal proceedings in Bulgaria does not result from slow work or irrational procedures, but rather from the irrationality of our court administration and the poor management of cases, which is not properly controlled. Before 1990 the Inspectorate with the Ministry of Justice exerted very strict control of the movement of cases, the observance of deadlines and the timely issuing of court decisions. Back then, for example, in order for the judges to observe the deadlines, the actual writing of their decision was being controlled through sending messages to the parties concerned. Regardless of the date on the decision, judging by the date in the appearance docket, one could find out when the decision was really written and why it was received so much later. At the moment such practices do not exist in Bulgaria, and the monitoring of judges is not satisfactorily strict.

Are you optimistic about it anyway?
It seems to me that we have to work hard to reform the working habits of our magistrates, because the working ethics of before is no longer existent.