© Tsvetelina Belutova, Capital
– In order for the resignations of Dimitrova and Shekerdzhiev to be accepted, they must be voted on by the Judicial Board of the SJC.
The two members of the Judicial Board of the Supreme Judicial Council, Boryana Dimitrova and Krassimir Shekerdzhiev, who are coordinators of the judicial card reform project, have resigned before the Supreme Judicial Council. To be adopted, they must be voted on by the SJC’s Judicial Board.
“Thank you for being our corrective and advisor for the past four years. You have helped us not to lose touch with reality, despite the constant deviations in the agenda of the Judicial Board of the SJC from important topics for the judiciary and in particular for the courts.” point out in an address to their colleagues Dimitrova and Shekerdzhiev.
“We resign with a sense of satisfaction that we have actually opened the debate for changes in the judiciary. From the very beginning of the work of this panel of the SJC Judicial Board, we have put on the table a number of problems that we expected to give rational solutions. we have arrived “, they write.
Dimitrova and Shekerdzhiev emphasize that they were clearly aware of the need for legislative changes and made every effort to be heard.
“We hope that we have introduced enough” noise “inside and outside the system to shed light on the big and small problems of the courts, to focus the responsibility of the authorities well enough and not to distort their interpretation when solving them in the future,” he wrote. in the letter motivating their resignations.
“If the price of attention to the real problems in the courts and the courts is our resignations, we submit them with a sense of satisfaction, but also of concern,” the two members of the panel of judges concluded.
Boryana Dimitrova and Krassimir Shekerdzhiev were elected members of the SJC from the judicial quota – with direct election of magistrates. In recent months, they have been working on a model for reforming and redrawing the court map, and the model they support provides for the closure of district courts. During a debate on the topic, organized by the caretaker Minister of Justice Yanaki Stoilov, no one supported the proposals of Dimitrova and Shekerdzhiev.
Judges from across the country, representatives of major political forces, lawyers, NGOs, municipal representatives and lawyers took part in the discussion.
At a meeting on February 18, the plenum of the Supreme Judicial Council decided to choose Model 4 for optimization of the court map and reorganization of the courts in Bulgaria. The model is the most radical and envisages the most serious changes, and three other models for change were rejected. Read more about them and what they envisage here.
Concerns arose during the initial discussion and vote – at the beginning of the year 564 judges from all over the country submitted a petition to the Supreme Judicial Council with an opinion against the model of judicial card reform. The risk of applying Model 4 is that it will lead to the closure of district courts and dangerously restrict citizens’ access to justice, warned the Supreme Bar Council.
Thus, the judicial map cannot be reformed, as it does not take into account any peculiarities of the development of the regions, nor the role of the district courts, he said. The Union of Judges to your encampment.
How would the proposed model of reform affect a city like Yambol – read the analysis here
Why the lawyers protested – read here
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