Soft and Harsh Penalties in Bulgaria

Abstract

Penal policies have been at the heart of public debate in Bulgaria for much of the past decade. The country’s criminal justice system and policies were subject to intensive outside scrutiny, both before and during the five-year period after its accession to the European Union. Inevitably, this made criminal justice and penal policies highly politicised hot topics — an area where a sense of moral panic was periodically infused by the European Commission’s assessments of the country’s efforts to tackle crime and corruption (see for instance Commission Report COM (2012) 411 final). The ensuing political and public pressures over the criminal justice system (and for an independent judiciary), for more ‘just’, that is harsher, penalties, clashed with the stark reality — the lack of vision and strategy that are necessary to transform a penal system which has changed little since the end of communism in 1989.