On the day of the Bulgarian Constitution and the professional holiday of lawyers, the IPI presented “The Judiciary in Numbers” – an interactive board that summarizes and presents the main aspects of the work of the court and the prosecutor’s office in Bulgaria, using reliable, objective and verifiable data. It shows the dynamics of processes in the judiciary over the past decade, as well as some of the challenges it faces.
Problems in justice abound, and the data used can objectively confirm the existence of some of them, namely:
- In Bulgaria, the budget of the judiciary continues to grow automatically every year and is not formed on the basis of setting strategic goals and evaluations of the achieved results. Despite the millions “poured in” by the European Union to introduce a program budget, one is still missing. This deprives us of one of the tools that can hold the judiciary accountable.
- The bloated budget is largely due to the excessive number of judges and prosecutors per capita. This is because the largest part of the judiciary’s budget goes to the category of “staff costs”.
- Costs are increasing, although, as can be seen from the data, the workload, i.e. work, to decrease in recent years.
The data can also be an indicator of deficits in the professional ethos:
- The numerous recusals suggest that from a guarantee of a fair trial they have become a means by which justice can be denied or at least delayed and made more expensive.
- Secondment has turned from a legitimate means of dealing with the workload in a judicial body into a mechanism to circumvent the competitive process and in practice leads to promotion, placing seconded magistrates in a dependent position.
The data show that there is an objective need to reformat the functioning of justice so that it provides predictability for business, protects the rights of the individual citizen and deters the statist urges of power.
Additional information can be found in the Judiciary in Numbers dashboard.
The commentary is from the weekly newsletter of the Institute for Market Economics (IPI).
