Sofia : The 35th anniversary of the adoption of Bulgaria’s Constitution in 1991 was marked with a roundtable discussion titled “35 Years of the Modern Constitution” in Parliament. The organizer of the discussion was the National Assembly Chair, Mihaela Dotsova, who earlier in the day also opened an exhibition dedicated to the anniversary.
The roundtable was attended by members of Parliament from the Seventh Grand National Assembly, which adopted the Constitution in 1991, former Parliament leaders, and members of Parliament from the current 52nd National Assembly.
On July 12, 1991, the Seventh GNA adopted the Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria. This was the first new Constitution adopted in a country from the former socialist bloc after the democratic changes that began at the end of 1989. It repealed the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, adopted on May 18, 1971. On July 13, 1991, the new Constitution was promulgated in the State Gazette and entered into force.
“The Constitution laid the foundation for the modern democratic Bulgarian state that we have today,” National Assembly Chair Mihaela Dotsova said on Tuesday as she opened a roundtable discussion. According to her, such anniversaries should be commemorated and celebrated.
Constitutional judge and member of the Seventh Grand National Assembly Prof. Yanaki Stoilov pointed out that the Constitution prescribes, but in itself does not guarantee anything. “What it contains must be guaranteed by those who implement it and those who in the institutions must give it real life”, said Stoilov.
The entire first part of the Constitution is based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, said Prof. Dr. Petar Beron, who was an MP in the Seventh Grand National Assembly. “If someone sets out to amend it, which is not desirable, they should keep in mind that there are fundamental things there that cannot be changed”, Beron added.
The President of the Atlantic Club of Bulgaria, Solomon Passy, noted that the Seventh Grand National Assembly formulated Bulgaria’s three most fundamental foreign policy priorities – membership in NATO, the EU, and a military alliance with the United States.
The preamble to the Constitution is poetry, it is a masterpiece, said the chair of the Commission for the Protection of Competition and a member of the Seventh Grand National Assembly, Rosen Karadimov. “The only problematic point was the acceptance in the preamble that Bulgaria is a social state. The reflex from communism was so great that social was perceived as socialist. Therefore, the understandable resistance of the colleagues from the Union of Democratic Forces was extremely heavy,” explained Karadimov. He recalled that the author of the preamble, Valeri Petrov, had then convinced the plenary hall that it should be adopted in this form.
“In our dream of having a separation of powers, we focused on political change, democratization of political life, and did not touch the justice system,” said Elena Poptodorova, a member of the Seventh Grand National Assembly, who is now vice president of the Atlantic Club of Bulgaria.
According to Alexander Yordanov, an MP of the Seventh Grand National Assembly, the adoption of a new constitution should have happened after legislative changes. According to Yordanov, 87 MPs refused to sign the Constitution at that time. He explained that the other former socialist countries adopted their new constitutions much later.
The Constitution played the most important role – firstly, to have a democratic transition and secondly, to provide an opportunity for the establishment of a market economy, said Nataliya Kiselova, a professor of constitutional law and Chair of the 51st National Assembly.
“The Constitution is an exceptional document. A historical document, still important today. It establishes a national consensus on common values for building the state,” said the co-founder of the Union of Democratic Forces and MP from the Seventh Grand National Assembly Petko Simeonov.
“Today we continue to be a democratic and legal country, but it seems to me that we are not a social state, said the then youngest member of the Grand National Assembly, Mariela Miteva.
