Bulgaria's judicial council names Lazarova acting chief prosecutor; minister weighs appeal
Bulgaria's Supreme Judicial Council voted 17-2 to install Magdalena Lazarova as acting chief prosecutor for six months. Justice Minister Naydenov is weighing an appeal.
Symbolic image · Photo: Bin im Garten / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped and resized)
Bulgaria's Supreme Judicial Council on Thursday elected Deputy Chief Prosecutor Magdalena Lazarova-Prodanova as acting head of the prosecution service. The plenum voted 17 in favour and two against. Lazarova will take over on Oct. 23 for up to six months from Vanya Stefanova, whose mandate expires on Oct. 22. She was nominated as next in seniority after Stefanova; the decision can be appealed within 14 days.
The session was contentious. Council member Atanaska Disheva sought a postponement, arguing that the three-day deadline for submitting documents had not been met, and asked for the candidate to be heard, the state news agency BTA reported. Both motions were clearly defeated, 3-15 and 1-18. Disheva also argued that the seniority principle was not mandatory, even if practice had usually followed it.
Justice Minister Nikolay Naydenov, who had urged the council to offer a genuine choice among several candidates, said he would assess whether he had grounds to challenge the election and whether doing so would be advisable. He said he had not put forward a candidate of his own because he had not received personnel assessments of prosecutors from the Supreme Cassation Prosecutor's Office, according to BTA.