Bulgaria reverts law linked to communist regime crimes

SOFIA, Bulgaria

Bulgaria's Constitutional Court has reversed an amendment in the penal code that placed a statute of limitations on the prosecution of crimes committed by the former Bulgarian Communist Party between 1944 and 1989, according to local media.

The court on Friday overturned the amendment to the penal code, which was approved by the parliament in September 2015, by a vote of 11 to one. Former Bulgarian Prime Minister Philip Dimitrov had cast the only dissenting vote.

Prosecutor-General Sotir Tsatsarov had made the appeal for overturning the amendment to the Constitutional Court, saying it conflicted with articles of the country's constitution.

A total of 28,630 people, who had been arrested for opposing the then communist regime were tried between December 1944 and April 1945. During that period, 2,618 people were executed, while 1,126 others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Later, thousands of people were sent to concentration camps.

In the 1980s, communist leader Todor Zhivkov led an assimilation campaign between 1984 and 1989 against Muslims and Turks who had been living in Bulgaria since the Ottoman era and after the empire's rule ended in the country, which resulted in several people getting sentenced to prison or sent to exile. The Communist regime had forced 360,000 Bulgarian citizens of Turkish origin to migrate to Turkey in 1989, according to the Turkish Foreign Ministry.

The communist regime, which collapsed in 1989, had also forced ethnic Turks to change their names to adopt Bulgarian names and also banned the use of their mother tongue. Thousands of Turks had demonstrated against the pressures they faced in many regions of Bulgaria in May 1989. The events were called the May incidents.