Some 15,000 applications for Bulgarian citizenship have piled up since 2013 for lack of the papers required, said Deputy Justice Minister Petko Petkov at the hearing of the parliamentary committee on policies towards Bulgarians living abroad.

“This only concerns the procedure of acquiring Bulgarian citizenship by descent in those cases when the certificate of descent issued by the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad is not accompanied by official documents corroborating this descent,” he says. “This year there are 4,000 certificates issued by the Agency without these official documents. Of them, around one quarter or almost 1,000 applicants have later provided the papers required. Since this problem has emerged, there have been a total of 18,000 applications lacking the official papers required; the documents needed have been added to 2-3,000 of them.”

The problem goes back to 2013 when, after a decision by the Commission for Personal Data Protection and a ruling by the Supreme Administrative Public Prosecutor's Office, the Citizenship Council came out with a decision that this official document was obligatory. The Citizenship Council consists of representatives of different institutions and its decisions require a two-thirds qualified majority. The problems started when it turned out that some of the certificates, issued by the Agency for Bulgarians Abroad did not contain a description of the documents proving Bulgarian descent. The law on Bulgarian citizenship enables a foreign national to become naturalized by summary procedure if Bulgarian descent is proven. Such an applicant does not have to prove residence of no less than 5 years, incomes, employment for supporting his or herself, knowledge of the Bulgarian language or renunciation of previous citizenship. The certificate of descent is issued by the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad and is submitted to the Citizenship Council together with the application. A Supreme Administrative Public Prosecutor's Office inspection conducted last year ascertained that the Agency has systematically been committing abuse in the issue of the certificates – out of a total of 810 randomly selected dossiers from the 2011-2013 period, 717 do not contain any proof of Bulgarian descent. As a result, hundreds of applicants from Kosovo and Albania have been given Bulgarian citizenship without ever being asked to provide any real evidence of descent. Besides issuing documents in violation of the law, the inspection also ascertained controversial practices at the Agency. In some cases instead of issuing a citizenship certificate, it gave applicants one month to furnish the documents required. Some applicants were simply turned down. There was even one instance when citizenship was not granted even though there were documents proving that the applicant’s mother was Bulgarian. After these scandalous revelations, the chairman of the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad Yordan Yanev was fired. Current chairman Boris Vangelov stated he was acquainted with the position of the Supreme Administrative Public Prosecutor's Office and explained:

“For many Bulgarians in Macedonia and Albania, as well as in other Bulgarian communities abroad it is impossible to provide any document proving their Bulgarian descent for objective or historical reasons. One option for them is for the organization of Bulgarians to issue certificates. As stipulated by the law on Bulgarians living outside the Republic of Bulgaria, there is a list, a register of such organizations. For the time being, two of them have been included in the register of our organization – the cultural information centre in Bosilegrad and the Bulgarian cultural club in Skopje. At this time they are not issuing certificates because they do not know what will happen to them once they reach the Citizenship Council.”

Deputy Justice Minister Petko Petkov stated that there was no other country in Europe where descent was established only by notarized declaration. He added that the waiting list was longest in Macedonia – around 10,000 applicants, but that there were applications from Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Ukraine and Moldova.

Justice Minister Hristo Ivanov, who also attended the hearing, assumed the commitment to submit a ministry analysis, to serve as the basis for future legislative initiatives for resolving the problem, to the parliamentary committee within one month.

English version: Milena Daynova