Bulgarian Jewish organisation welcomes court ruling in case of discriminatory speech by Vuzrazhdane party leader
The Shalom Organisation of the Jews in Bulgaria has welcomed a February 20 ruling by the Supreme Administrative Court upholding a 2023 decision by the Commission against Discrimination against minority pro-Russian Vuzrazhdane party leader Kostadin Kostadinov for using hate speech against Daniel Lorer.
The commission had ruled that Kostadinov had committed, in a series of Facebook posts, harassment of Lorer on the basis of religion, ethnicity and origin.
It ordered Kostadinov to remove six Facebook posts and filter comments that had been posted.
Kostadinov took the ruling on appeal through the courts in Varna, including with the claim that his posts had been directed against Lorer – an MP for We Continue the Change-Democratic Bulgaria – on the basis of his being a political opponent, not because of Lorer’s personal qualities.
Kostadinov’s posts had, among other labels, referred to Lorer as a “foreigner”, “national traitor”, “foreign agent”, “anti-human”, “wanting us, the Bulgarians, to be gone, and our state to disappear” and he likened Lorer to a reptile.
The Supreme Administrative Court, in a ruling that is final, upheld the Commission against Discrimination’s findings and the findings of the lower courts, in which Bulgarian law against discrimination and the provisions of the European Charter of Human Rights had been cited.
Shalom said in a Facebook post on February 26: “We welcome the court’s decision as a clear and necessary signal that the public speech – especially when coming from persons holding senior government offices – carries liability”.
“The terms ‘national traitor’, ‘foreign agent’, or ‘anti-human’, addressed to a person on the basis of their Jewish or any other origin are not simply unacceptable in the democratic debate – they constitute a violation of the law and undermine the fundamental principles of the rule of law,” Shalom said.
“We have been demanding for years such rhetoric, as well as the abuse of historical comparisons to the Holocaust, for which we have repeatedly questioned competent authorities, to be clearly differentiated and sanctioned within the law.
“The current decision is an important step towards asserting a standard for public responsibility and intolerance to such type of speech.”
Shalom called on all MPs to fulfill their mandate in accordance with the constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria – “representing all Bulgarian society, regardless of ethnic origin, religion, sex or other personal characteristics, and protecting the dignity and equality of every citizen”.
Lorer, in a Facebook post, said that he had been expelled from the We Continue the Change party because, he said, he had refused to transgress his moral principles and cooperate with Vuzrazhdane in Parliament.
“This week the Supreme Administrative Court proved me right,” he said.
Lorer, a former president of the Sofia organisation of Shalom, said that freedom of speech is not a licence for humiliation and that a political opponent is defeated with a vision, not with dehumanisation based on ethnicity or faith.
“I was expelled from We Continue the Change because of my position, but today I am fully rehabilitated. Expulsion from a party is a political act, but the abandonment of principles is moral bankruptcy,” he said.
(Photo montage: Lorer, left, and Kostadinov)
