Bulgaria Constitutional Court rejects application to rule on military aid to Ukraine
Bulgaria’s Constitutional Court has rejected an appeal from 50 MPs to rule on the National Assembly’s decision to supply military materiel to Ukraine as inadmissible and closed the case.
In its ruling, the high court said that it was asked to assess “the ethical side of foreign policy in a specific political context” that presented the court with a choice “that can be subject solely to political discretion.”
The court said that while it can rule on political matters, including those relating to foreign policy, in cases when there was a “conflict of competence” between state institutions, ruling on the substance of this complaint would represent “entering the field of discretion of political institutions and re-ordering their priority values and political goals.”
Doing so would re-write the political agenda, bypassing the will of the voters, who can hold parties and MPs accountable for their decisions by casting ballots in elections, the Constitutional Court said.
In a dissenting opinion, judge Yanaki Stoilov, a former long-time MP for the Bulgarian Socialist Party, one of the two political parties whose MPs backed the Constitutional Court application, argued that the court shirked its responsibility with the inadmissibility ruling.
Stoilov wrote that the rest of the court took the expedient route in rejecting the appeal because the applicants challenged Parliament’s decision in its entirety, but it could have chosen to examine individual parts of the National Assembly’s decision, which would have cleared the admissibility threshold.
(Photo: Clive Leviev-Sawyer)
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