April 2 (BTA) - A three-judge panel of Bulgaria's Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) has ruled to take no further action on a motion to stay the enforcement of an appealed part of joint instructions of February 8, 2021 by which the Central Election Commission (CEC) and the Commission for Personal Data Protection (CPDP) banned video monitoring of the ballot counting process, the SAC said in a press release on Friday.

The supreme judges held that ruling on the merits of the motion is procedurally impossible and the motion itself is inadmissible. Any pronouncement of the Court would be appealable before a five-judge panel of the SAC, i.e. it cannot take legal effect before the holding of the elections on April 4.

Тhe CEC had not been properly summoned due to the short deadline, and the SAC
scheduled the next hearing in the case for April 14.

CPDP Chair Ventsislav Karadjov asked the SAC to suspend the appeal proceedings until it is decided whether the matter will be referred to the EU Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling. According to Karadjov, the judgment of the Sofia City Administrative Court (SCAC) is not legally conforming. In his opinion, the Luxembourg Court must be approached because this is the first time that the question of direct inapplicability of the EU General Data Protection Regulation has been raised.

Ballot counting can be monitored, but this requires a specific procedure which has to be established by an amendment to the Election Code, Karadjov argued.

The SAC case was instituted after the CEC appealed against a March 15, 2021 judgment of the SCAC which revoked the video monitoring ban. The SCAC judgment stated that video monitoring guarantees "transparency, objectivity, lawfulness of the election process, equal treatment of those involved in it, and ensuring freedom of expression and the right to information". RY, RI/PP, LG
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Source: Sofia