Bulgaria's President refers Constitutional amendments to the Constitutional Court

President Rumen Radev on January 8 referred to the Constitutional Court over the amendments to the Bulgarian Constitution, adopted by the Parliament on December 20 and promulgated in the State Gazette on 22 December 2023.

President Radev challenges the constitutionality of:

• provisions giving the right to people with dual citizenship to be MPs and ministers;
• the possibility to set qualified majorities by law for the election of the leadership of state bodies;
• the procedure for appointing a caretaker government; and
• provisions regulating the term of various bodies in the legislature of the National Assembly.

The President challenges the constitutionality of the new procedure for appointing the Presidents of the Supreme Court of Cassation and the Supreme Administrative Court, and the Prosecutor General, without issuance of a Presidential Decree for them. According to the head of state, all these revisions, besides containing contradictions with other constitutional provisions, change the balance between the main state institutions and the mutual control between them. According to Rumen Radev, they directly affect the form of state governance and therefore are within the exclusive competence of a Grand National Assembly.

The President is also challenging the procedure by which the Parliament adopted the amendments to the Basic Law.

"The Constitution can be changed either with a large political majority and quickly (without a time limit between the three separate voting days), or with a smaller political majority but more slowly (with a minimum time limit of two months between the different voting days)," Radev stressed in his reasoning.

He opposes the hasty adoption of constitutional amendments with a minimum required majority and without substantive discussion.

"Compliance with the procedure for amending the Basic Law and the principles on which the structure, organisation and functioning of the democratic state are built are the only way in which the decisive role of law can be respected. Failure to respect them indicates that the body empowered to create law denies its decisive role," Rumen Radev recalled in his request to the court.