Judges' Union to Radev: Check How Magistrates Are Wiretapped.

The Bulgarian Judges’ Union has called on Prime Minister Rumen Radev to organise an independent review of the use of special surveillance tools against magistrates. The call comes in the context of the Corruption Leaks revelations.

The Judges’ Union says that data from recent years raises serious doubts about the specific need to use special surveillance tools against judges, prosecutors and investigators, as well as about the effectiveness of the institutional safeguards provided by law against the abuse of these extraordinary and secret methods of gathering information.

The union cites the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee’s analysis Wiretapped Justice, which outlines a troubling trend of systematic use of special surveillance tools against magistrates with extremely limited subsequent criminal justice results. The suspicion is that judges and prosecutors are being widely wiretapped in order to keep them dependent. The union says the persistent discrepancy between the active surveillance of magistrates and the lack of subsequent cases is particularly concerning.

The judges are calling on Radev to commission a comprehensive interinstitutional analysis of the use of special surveillance tools against judges, prosecutors and investigators. The analysis should cover the number of requests, authorisations and actually applied surveillance measures against magistrates; the institutions and officials that initiated the requests; the nature and specificity of the factual grounds on which the requests were made; the number of refusals to authorise surveillance; the ratio between the surveillance measures applied, the material evidence prepared, the criminal proceedings initiated, the indictments filed and the convictions issued; the duration of the surveillance and the cases in which authorisations were repeatedly extended. In effect, the Bulgarian Judges’ Union is insisting on a review of whether the services used compromising information in order to obtain permission for wiretapping.

So far, no institution has confirmed the authenticity of the documents from Corruption Leaks, to which Sega also gained access from colleagues at BIRD. None of the people mentioned in the documents, however, has denied the events and facts described in them.