Close to the finish line?

The latest report on reform in Bulgaria marks the beginning of the end of the European Commission’s post-accession monitoring of the Balkan country. Since it joined the European Union in 2007 together with Romania, Bulgaria has been subject to annual reports and semi-annual interim reports under the co-operation and verification mechanism (CVM). But the Commission will issue its next report only at the end of 2013 and expects that report to be the last. “The Commission looks forward to Bulgaria completing the particular process of the CVM and addressing these issues on the same basis as other member states,” yesterday’s report says. Ending the monitoring regime for Bulgaria is not controversial: the college of commissioners adopted the report without debate yesterday (18 July).

This is good news for the centre-right government of Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, which faces a parliamentary election in a year’s time. “The coming 18 months will be a time in which all Bulgarian institutions will prove their determination to change the judicial system and to cut back corruption and organised crime,” Borisov said. And Nickolay Mladenov, Bulgaria’s foreign minister, considers the Commission’s recommendations to be “absolutely do-able”.

Speaking to European Voice after the publication of the report, Mladenov said: “We are nearing the end of the CVM, and we have to complete what we started. The important thing is that we get the job done, with or without the mechanism – it is not as if people were not aware of the challenges facing our country.” Chief among these is how to rein in the country’s powerful crime syndicates.

Schengen troubles

Despite the Commission’s recognition of the progress made by Bulgaria, the country risks being caught up in the political chaos engulfing its much bigger neighbour Romania. Both countries were hoping to join the EU’s Schengen area of borderless travel later this year, after the Commission found that they had met the technical preconditions. But since last year, the Dutch government has been blocking decisions to let Bulgaria and Romania join the Schengen area, pointing to problems in the two countries’ judiciary and law enforcement. Bulgaria’s report may or may not be sufficiently positive for the Dutch government that emerges from an early parliamentary election in September to drop its objections; but with turmoil in next-door Romania, Schengen accession appears to have receded into the distance.

“A lot of this is politics, domestic politics in some cases,” Mladenov said about the opposition to Bulgaria over Schengen. “But I know for a fact that what we have done on Schengen is absolutely impeccable, and it is a pity that this gets caught up in a situation beyond our control. I hope that no immediate linkage is made between the content of the report on Romania and our accession to Schengen.”

“We will continue fighting and constructively engaging with our partners, and I will continue to explain that we should not be treated as a package,” he said. “I hope we remember that this is a process based on clear criteria and agreements that we have reached as a Union.”

Fact File

REPORT AT A GLANCE

The Commission report acknowledges “strong political will to achieve deep and lasting reform” over the five years since Bulgaria joined, and sees the main challenge now as filling some key strategic gaps and ensuring effective implementation. But “the resolve to deliver the reforms has been variable”, and a more consistent implementation is needed “to join together disparate actions”. The report blames a lack of direction in policy for holding back progress and failing to build the necessary momentum in the reform process. Consequently, legal and constitutional reforms are incomplete, and important investments in the structures to fight organised crime have not led to the hoped-for results.

A new legal and institutional judicial framework has not made significant improvements in judicial accountability and efficiency, with excessively slow legal proceedings, and many important cases either not concluded, or not reaching dissuasive results. The report sees the deficiencies as a reflection of important structural, procedural and organisational weaknesses. It cites a recent consultation that “exposed stark disagreement among judges on the conditions for the application of preliminary detention of defendants in serious criminal cases” as an example of inconsistencies that provoke “substantial concerns”.

In the fight against organised crime, convincing results are still missing at both the pre-trial and trial phases, with many unsolved and delayed cases. The Commission cites a Europol conclusion that “organised crime in Bulgaria is unique in the EU to the extent that it exercises considerable influence over the economy which is a platform to influence the political process and state institutions”. Few important organised crime cases have received sentences, there have been acquittals “in important cases where evidence in the public domain raised expectations of convictions”, and “serious concerns must be raised regarding the poor results in uncovering contract killings”.

The Commission also records “particular concerns” over the fight against corruption, highlighting continuous delays and postponements at appeal court level in two emblematic cases involving fraud with EU funds, where long prison sentences had been handed down in 2010. “No satisfactory explanation has been found why the available procedural possibilities to accelerate these emblematic cases have not been actively pursued by the judiciary,” the report comments. Similarly, an administrative authority to establish and sanction conflicts of interest “has not yet been able to prove itself in convincing decisions in important cases”.

 

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