Couple of news from Bulgaria today made me think, that the Bulgarian legal system is really having a problem. But the problem also goes to the media, and the society. Or may be it starts there.
First, the interior minister, Mikhail Mikov, has asked the mobile operators to send SMS (text message) to each subscriber, with just three words “No to Corruption”. Of course, the media is mocking our minister, without even thinking that corruption includes not only governmental officials, who take money, but also citizens, who give money. So, the addressees are the right ones. Every Bulgarian.
Secondly, the prosecution failed in court to prove in court that one of the formed deputy district attorneys (deputy regional prosecutor in Sofia) was guilty as charged. The media report that only two prosecutors have been sentenced in the last 19 years. Not a single judge has been found guilty of any crime. The truth, however, is that until recently, the law and the Constitution were giving full immunity to judges and prosecutors, so they could have not been charged at all. The extreme of this immunity was that if any of the previous chief prosecutors (attorney generals to the US visitors) would commit a crime – whatever crime, including murder – nobody could have asked his immunity, as the only one capable of requesting immunity of a prosecutor was… the chief prosecutor himself.
So, the legal system has serious problems, and we all have to agree on the way forward – better to have bad cases, like the one above, from the perspective of the law and order, than have no cases at all. I am sure that the only way to deal with rotten legal system is when it comes to the teeth of the society. If the Bulgarian society is so patient, and the European Union can not change that, then we’ll be in a real trouble.
The problem with the media is, that they don’t really want to engage in a long conversation with the politicians and the society on the way out of this viscous circle, where Bulgaria is today. If the society is not ready yet (for a number of reasons) to react against the lack of justice, then it is up to the media to serve as a whistle-blower. Or at least to give space for the whistle-blowers. And when I say “whistle-blower” I don’t have in mind pseudo-ones, like the current mayor of Sofia, who – among other silly things he has done or said, managed to say that he will not obey court decisions which he believes are not correct. Yes, you heard me right – he said that he will not follow a court decision, unless “the public opinion says he has to”. And he is the person who the European People Party accepted as one of their members…