Bulgaria’s justice deficits have become an invariable part of local political discourse. Often, this leads to numerous statutory changes and rarely to a quality change of the environment. One of the issues that will need to be addressed, regardless of which political majority dominates the 50th and subsequent National Assemblies, is the adoption of a number of amendments or an entirely new Judicial System Act. As to whether these amendments are, indeed, in the direction of resolving the permanent deficits of the judiciary, we can also distinguish by how and whether the bypass routes to career development at high levels of the judiciary and the prosecutor’s office, statutorily veiled as secondments of judges, prosecutors and investigators, will be rearranged.
From a tool overcoming staff shortages in the courts and the prosecutor’s offices, the secondment has transformed to a means of forming dependencies and obedience in the handling of cases and files. It is achieved by a simplified formula – the seconded person is temporarily given the opportunity to occupy a position in a higher instance and at a higher salary or at a favorable place (such as the capital city). Thus, both his/her remuneration and status are influenced by the administrative head who seconded them.
Secondment of Judges to and from District Courts
The official data on which our analysis is based is for the period January 2016 to December 2023. The data provided by the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) predictably reveals that the main dynamics in terms of secondment of judges is observed in Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna and Burgas, with the Sofia City Court (SCC) being particularly prominent. The presumption is that the SCC, and the Sofia District Court (SDC), are centres of attraction for judges from lower instances and/or from other regions of the country. The SCC is indeed the court where most judges are seconded, and the one from which most judges are seconded. The former is due to geographical (capital city) and status (types of cases) attractiveness, and also because this is the court where cases of social and economic importance are heard.
The last four years, the pulling power of the SDC is not only lower than that of the SCC, but also of the District Courts in Burgas and Plovdiv. Such a migration can be explained by the fact that these are large district cities, characterized by a more dynamic economic and social life which implies a greater workload for the courts. Thus, socially and economically less developed cities seem to have better staffed district courts that can cope with the respective workload.
For the past eight years, not a single judge was seconded to the District Courts in Kardzhali, Lovech, Montana, Pleven, Silistra, Smolyan and Haskovo, and in most of the other District Courts only one or two people were seconded. As a rule, the secondment of judges from these courts is to a higher instance court and usually lasts a long time which means bypassing the formal judicial competitions.
A check of all registers of seconded judges shows that secondments are made without any reasoning. Instead of real motives, there are comments such as ‘pending the return of the holder’, ‘vacant post’, ‘official necessity’, ‘high workload’. However, this is merely a statement of fact. No information can be found anywhere as to why one judge or court is preferred to another, which only reinforces the impression of subjectivity and favouritism towards certain individuals.
Period of Secondment
Data regarding the district instance courts shows а trend of gradually increasing levels of seconded judges from the district courts for more than 12 months since 2017. More noticeable is the increase in their number in and after 2019. This is mainly due to legislative changes in 2017 and 2018 which opened the door to abuse of the institute of secondment in the long term, i.e. accumulation of more and more months when seconded.
The ratio between secondments under and over 12 months has in recent years been in favour of the long-term one, with the difference being almost 2.5 times as of December 2023. There are district court judges seconded for 51, 58, 59, 66, 70, 73, 94, 98, 134 months, etc. Judges are mostly seconded to higher courts. This, coupled with the lengthy period of time of secondment, is virtually tantamount to promotion, i.e. ignoring the principles of merit-based career growth.
Recommendations
We present some options to improve the secondment regime and address its abuses:
- Link secondments to strict criteria from the SINS workload system. This should include also what criteria can be used for secondment – objectivity that does not allow arbitrary choice of which court a judge can be seconded from and which court he can be seconded to.
- A consequent obligation, following the publication of the periodic court/prosecutor’s caseload data, for the relevant College (of the Supreme Judicial Council – judicial or prosecutorial) to review the secondment list and decide that secondment is no longer necessary.
- Random allocation system for secondment similar to the case allocation system – all judges with the necessary experience and rank should be included in lists by legal matter after having given their prior consent.
- Alternatively, in addition to the regular competitions held by the SJC, a collective decision could be taken by the general assembly of the respective court, binding the Chairman, on the secondment and de-secondment of judges.
- Repeal of the changes voted at the end of 2023 to Rules for Determining and Disbursing Funds for Additional Labor Remuneration of Seconded Magistrates.
- Abolition of the possibility for the Chairman of the Supreme Administrative Court to second judges from general (Regional Courts and District Courts) courts to administrative courts.
The full text of the analysis in Bulgarian can be found here.
