Your Partner in Bulgaria.

Bulgarian courts should accepts/send papers online

This week we have achieved a small victory. We are representatives of a client on a case, heard in Stara Zagora District Court. We have asked the judge to send by email copies of the latest hearing minutes. The judge refused, grounding her decision with “the court doesn’t have that practice”. We’ll that was not quite true. Art. 42 para 4 of the Civil Proceedings Code allows the court to send notices and subpoenas by email. We claimed that the court can use that to send copies of court documents too.

We have lodged an application to the Chairperson of Stara Zagora District Court, requesting the Chairman to “create such practice”. The court Chairperson accepted our arguments and ordered the judge to apply directly the aforesaid article. Yesterday we have received the requested documents by email.

I’m writing about this since that a major breakthrough in how the Bulgarian court operates. As I’ve said before, one of the major reasons of why lawsuits  take so long to be tried is the notice/subpoena problem. Electronic means solve this problem, but the the judges are reluctant to use them. There’s no explanation why.

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Understanding Bulgaria’s Judges Thinking

Almost half of the legislation of Bulgaria is outdated. Most of the laws have been adopted in the 50s of the last century during a communist society organization regime. Almost none of them is compatible to the free market and economics of the current society. An exception from that are the new laws adopted under the pressure of the EU legislation conformity requirements (such as competition  and consumer protection legislation).

But the laws that concern regular property buyers in Bulgaria are still obsolete. I’m talking about the Ownership Act (created 1951) and the Obligations and Contracts Act (created 1950). These are the main laws that regulate the consequences when a person buys a property in Bulgaria. The worst case is the off-plan purchases. There is no regulation regarding off-plan purchases. Therefore the judges started to extract relevant regulations from two separate contracts: the contract for manufacture and preliminary contract for purchase/sale.

This causes controversial court practice and different court resolution in similar cases (e.g. default of the developer and failure for refund). The controversy in the practice is striking in the different parts of Bulgaria. Although all courts should mind the Supreme Court’s interpretations, the judges are influence by other factors. The judges usually are afraid to think out-0f-the-box and rule rather conservative.  They are not involved in the “real world” themselves because they are living in a “closed system” – the judicial system is not reformed at all. This is one of the biggest criticisms of EU towards Bulgaria. The corruption is also one of the biggest issues in our judicial system. Even the United states ambassador Mr. James Warlick observed this negative  practice.

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How’s court decision taken in Bulgaria

We’ve just found a great article in The Economist about scientific research of what influences judges for taking a particular decision. It turns out that “Justice is what the judge had for breakfast” indeed. In our litigation practice we can confirm that this is indeed true. Moreover, we can add some additional factors pushing the course of the court resolution – this is:

  • judge’s attitude towards the parties lawyers;
  • if the judge is overloaded with cases;
  • if the previous case parties have made him angry;
  • if the judge was sleeping well the last night etc.

It’s all human factors which influence court decision in Bulgaria and which sometime breaks a party’s life. Last but not least (even more significant than the previous ones) it’s the corruption. The judicial system of Bulgaria is sill encapsulated and  if you’re close friend to the judge you can get whatever court resolution you want – the judge will always find a legal way to justify their resolution.

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Bulgarian lawsuit procedure: what to expect

If you happen to be a party in a lawsuit in Bulgaria, you should be aware of the following:

  1. Don’t be impatient. Bulgarian Civil Proceedings Code regulates certain terms that have to be taken into consideration
  2. The weakest part in a lawsuit is the delivery of subpoenas. All the papers which have to be delivered to the parties, are carried by employees of the court called “призовкари” (subpoena carriers) . The delivery employees are not limited to delivery terms, as the law assumes that there may be troubles finding the parties. That’s why a typical subpoena delivery may take about a month.
  3. When a lawsuit is filed, there is one month period, which has to pass, before the judge sets a date for the first hearing. This is a period in which the defendant has to submit an answer to the claim. Please note that this period starts, as from the day the claim was delivered to the defendant.(See point 2 above)
  4. The judge may “stretch” the lawsuit in several hearings, depending on how complicated is the case. Usually lawsuits have two or three hearings. The time between the hearings depends on the caseload of the particular judge. Usually its one or two months.
  5. When the lawsuit is announced for resolving by the judge, there is a one month term during which the judge has to issue the court resolution.
  6. If the resolution is not appealed, it enters into force and you may engage a law enforcement agent.

Of course the above is just a brief explanation of the lawsuit procedure in Bulgaria, but basically you don’t have to push your lawyer,because not everything depends on him/her.

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