site.btaBTA Director General Valchev Salutes Attorneys' Role in Defending the Right to Information

BTA Director General Kiril Valchev thanked Bulgarian attorneys for their support and defence of journalists and the media at the Annual General Assembly of Attorneys in Bulgaria in Sofia on Saturday.

Valchev also said he expected cooperation between the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) and the Bulgarian Bar to continue under the profession’s new leadership.

Valchev said he had more than 20 years of legal practice, mainly in intellectual property, and that only temporarily, under the law, he had suspended his rights to practice as an attorney while serving as BTA Director General.

In his address, Valchev thanked the previous leadership of the Bulgarian Bar for its joint work with the national news agency and voiced confidence that it would continue with the new leadership. He also thanked the Supreme Bar Council for supporting his election to a second term as BTA Director General.

Valchev recalled that his second term began on the eve of the agency’s 128th anniversary, February 16, the date when the first news bulletin was published in 1898, “ten years after the adoption of Bulgaria’s first Attorneys Act, which places our two institutions among the first to extend their work across three centuries in the history of modern Bulgaria”.

He illustrated the importance of the protection Bulgarian media and journalists receive with a specific case. During a police check, BTA received an inquiry from a district police chief in a small town asking “who, in a BTA car, one of the clearly marked electric vehicles used by correspondents and carrying the agency’s logos, was taking pictures of the park, the mosque, the kindergarten and other buildings in a village”.

BTA reporters and correspondents, like journalists from all Bulgarian media, constantly take photos in public places because it is part of their job, so that media outlets can uphold Bulgarian citizens’ constitutional right to information, Valchev said.

He explained that the case concerned BTA’s Bulgaria in Four Seasons project, under which public spaces and buildings are photographed in more than 5,000 населени places. So far, the project has produced 56,600 photos from 3,949 places. “Imagine what it would be like if, in each of them, a police chief opened a check on why a BTA journalist is photographing the square,” Valchev said.

He described the case as another example of why protecting the right to information remained important and recalled that the European Court of Human Rights had case law saying journalists could not be barred from photographing in public places, including a 2009 ruling linked to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Thanks to the lawyers of journalists and media outlets, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and Bulgarian courts have built up extensive case law that protects the right to information, Valchev said.

Valchev also noted Bulgaria’s progress in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, where the country ranked 70th out of 180 in 2025, up from 111th in 2019.

In his closing remarks, Valchev said that BTA would continue to systematically cover the work of the legal profession. BTA data show that over the past 10 years it has published 2,828 stories about Bulgarian attorneys, bar associations, and the Supreme Bar Council. In 2025, the totals were 708 in Bulgarian and 284 in English.

Bulgarian journalism would continue to rely on the support of the Bulgarian Bar, Valchev said, as he wished the assembly productive work.