3.1.2 NATIONAL FRAMEWORK CONCERNING DEPRIVATION OF LIBERTY 3.1.2.2 Pre-trial proceedings Once the pre-trial proceedings are initiated, the person with IPD suspected in perpetration of the crime should be accused/indicted. However, the judges interviewed under the present research stated that the most significant problem from the proceedings point of view is the fact that persons with IPD are not indicted/accused and thus not provided with their procedural rights as accused persons. This common practice was raised in Case C 467/18 of the Court of Justice of the European Union.84 The case concerns the compulsory treatment of а man with psychosocial disability who allegedly committed murder of his mother in 2015. Informed of his disability by witnesses, the police officers took him to the emergency unit of a psychiatric hospital and two weeks later the court ordered that the disabled person be placed under civil involuntary treatment in a psychiatric hospital for a period of 6 months under the Health Act. This order was renewed continuously until the date of the request by the judge to the CJ (3 years later). The forensic psychiatrists found that the person was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One year later the district prosecutor suspended the criminal proceedings because the disabled person was suffering from a psicho-social disability. Since the person was unable to participate in the proceedings, the prosecutor did not serve that decree on him. More than two years later, the Appellate Prosecutor ordered the criminal proceedings to be resumed and made provision for the continuation of the person‘s committal under the Health Act. Two and a half years later a prosecutor’s decree closed the criminal proceedings initiated against the disabled person. The Prosecutor’s Office concluded that compulsory treatment should be ordered because the disabled person had intentionally committed an offence in a state of mental incompetence that made him criminally irresponsible. That decree was served on his sister. The prosecutor brought an application before the referring District Court for committal to compulsory treatment a psychiatric hospital under the Criminal Procedure Code. The disabled person (perpetrator) was never questioned during the investigation, was not notified of the criminal procedure initiated against him, was not the subject of criminal proceedings, was not given access to a lawyer and had no recourse to a judicial remedy against the findings of law or fact of the prosecutors. The judge who requested preliminary ruling from the Court of Justice raised her doubts whether the national Criminal Procedure Code and the Health Act provisions governing the compulsory and involuntary treatment procedures are in conformity with the rights guaranteed by Directives 2012/13, 2013/48 and 2016/343 and by the Charter. She also posed the issue that the Criminal Procedure Code (Art. 427) does not enable a court to verify whether, during the initial investigation, the person considered to be the perpetrator was granted the minimum procedural guarantees for the exercise of his rights of defense. The perpetrator also has alleged Case C 467/18 of the Court of Justice of the European Union, 19 September 2019, available at: https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=217905&doclang=EN#:~:text=In%20Case%20C%E2%80%91467%2F18%2C%20REQUEST%20 for%20a%20preliminary%20ruling,July%202018%2C%20in%20the%20criminal%20proceedings%20against%20EP%2C. 84 Bulgarian Helsinki Committee 29