DAY 4 – KRASSIMIR KANEV Krassimir Kanev* “Coerced interrogations: key challenges for the Bulgarian criminal justice system” * Director of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee Introduction Ill-treatment by the police during arrest and inside the police stations is widespread in Bulgaria. Over the past seven years the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee conducted several surveys on representative samples of prisoners about their experiences during pre-trial proceedings. According to the most recent survey conducted in the period June-November 2021 on a representative sample of 1 010 convicted prisoners from all the prisons in Bulgaria, whose pre-trial proceedings started after 1 July 2019, 24% of the respondents stated that physical force had been used against them during arrest and 21% - that such force had been used against them inside police custody during their 24-hour police detention. Two representative surveys among prisoners, conducted in the period 2015-2017 came up with very similar results. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has pronounced dozens of judgments against Bulgaria relating to ill-treatment of detainees, some of which resulted in their death. In March 2015, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) issued a public statement concerning Bulgaria in which it stated that “men and women (including juveniles) in the custody of the police continued to run a significant risk of being ill-treated, both at the time of apprehension and during subsequent questioning” (CPT/Inf (2015) 17, § 5). While the use of proportional force during arrest may be justified in some cases, its use in the police station is very hard to justify. In-depth interviews with prisoner -victims of ill-treatment by the police reveal its methods. In most of the cases police operatives beat up detainees with fists, kicks, truncheons and other hard objects all over the body. Occasionally, they use more “sophisticated” methods, e.g., generators of electricity, connected to their immobilized fingers with wires. The interviews also reveal its purpose, which in most cases is to obtain information: either selfincriminating confessions or information about the involvement in the particular crime of third parties. Police detention and “explorative interviews” Under the Bulgarian law, the 24-hour police detention is not part of the criminal proceedings and, in theory, the self-incriminating statements of the detainees cannot be included in the criminal file and cannot be relied on by the court for conviction. But in 2018 the ECtHR found a violation of Article 6 §§ 1 and 3 © of the Convention in the case Dimitar Mitev v. Bulgaria where a detainee was questioned without the presence of a lawyer by police operatives to whom he made a confession. The operatives were subsequently questioned by the court in the criminal proceedings against him and their testimonies served as a basis for his conviction. According to the Ministry of Interior Act (MIA), police may detain a person for 24 hours if there is data that he/she had committed a criminal offense. Such a person however is not considered a “suspect” within the meaning of the EU Roadmap directives by the Bulgarian law and doctrine, which are thus deemed inapplicable to police detention. This is why the safeguards they envisage are not implemented at that stage. In the 2021 survey, more than 61% of the respondents stated that they did not have a lawyer at all during their 24-hour police detention. Another 22% stated that they had a contact with a lawyer at the end of this detention when the latter came to participate in the opening 37