EU judges to analyse failures of key Bulgarian court cases
Photo © Yanchenko - Fotolia
(SOFIA) - Bulgaria has invited judges and prosecutors from five EU states to analyse key court cases against notorious criminals, which have been followed by Brussels, the justice ministry said Wednesday.
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain will dispatch their magistrates to Sofia to examine why the cases moved so slowly through the courts and why the prosecution failed to get convictions, the ministry said.
They will also give advice on ways to improve the work of prosecutors and speed up proceedings.
Bulgaria, which joined the European Union in 2007, is still under a special monitoring mechanism over its slow and inefficient judiciary, which persistently fails to curb organised crime and corruption.
One of the cases on the foreign experts' list is that against Plamen Galev and Angel Hristov, known as the Galev brothers.
The two notorious crime bosses were each condemned in May to five years in jail for racketeering but have still eluded police efforts to arrest them.
Another key case concerns the misuse of EU pre-accession farm aid by businessman Mario Nikolov, which was uncovered shortly after Bulgaria joined the bloc but dragged on until 2010, when Nikolov received a 12-year jail sentence.
The European Commission is due to issue its next progress monitoring report on Bulgaria and neighbouring Romania in July but newspaper reports already paint a bleak picture of the progress of the Bulgarian judiciary.
Out of 91 court trials monitored by Brussels, only 13 have been concluded, eight of them with jail sentences, they say.
Meanwhile, scores of corruption and organised crime cases remain unresolved.