site.btaSeven Bills Amending Penal Code Adopted on First Reading

At its sitting here on Friday, the National Assembly adopted on first reading all seven bills amending the Penal Code that were on the agenda. Two of the bills were put forward by the Council of Ministers and the rest, by MPs from various parliamentary groups. 

One of the caretaker government’s bills aims to reduce the fines for defamation and insult as well as to cancel the more severely punishable corpus delicti when officials are concerned. The other bill is aimed at criminal prosecution of persons creating conditions for online piracy by building and maintaining websites for torrent trackers, web platforms, chat groups in applications for online exchange of pirated content and other activities.  

Part of the first-reading amendments are related to road traffic violations and aim to increase the penalties and introduce new ones for prevention purposes. Other revisions concern penalties for migrant trafficking. One of the approved bills aims to protect the life and health of animals by increasing the penalties for this type of crimes, in view of the increase in the cases of animal cruelty. 

Legal Affairs Committee Chairman Stoyu Stoev announced that he is not in favour of the Penal Code being "patched up", but that would be better than drafting a completely new one. He called for a working group with all interested institutions so that a common consensus could be reached on how to move the country's penal policy forward in the future.

There Is Such a People floor leader Toshko Yordanov said that seizing private property is ingrained in the ideology of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). Before the second reading of the bills, his parliamentary group will make proposals towards correcting the BSP's ideas. Raising penalties is not prevention, he warned.

BSP for Bulgaria floor leader Korneliya Ninova replied that it is not communism but professionalism. She recalled proposals by judges and investigators to impound a car for diving at speeds 50 km above the speed limit, to confiscate a car for driving with blood alcohol content of over 1.2%. She suggested a three-day period for suggestions between the two readings.

Justice Minister Krum Zarkov pointed out that the bill of the Council of Ministers contains matters that concern insult and defamation, and others about racism and xenophobia. "We are talking about a crime such as kidnapping, desecration of a religious temple, these are serious crimes, you cannot say that we are doing this to prevent someone from speaking," he replied to Vazrazhdane floor leader Kostadin Kostadinov. 

According to Kostadinov, the bill gives an immense opportunity to a prosecutor for interpretations of various types of crimes. "We should not get to the mass madness in which American society is immersed, where there is 'positive discrimination'," he argued.

Georg Georgiev MP of GERB-UDF suggested that hate crimes should be listed in more detail before the second reading. His colleague Lyuben Dilov commented: "We face a risk - when you are a hammer, most problems look like a nail." "Perhaps we should seriously consider whether, alongside changes to the Penal Code, we should also change the education act," he suggested.