Projects

Legal education reform is another important aspect of legal reforms that has been largely overlooked in recent years and that has become a focus of BILI’s efforts and expertise. Quality legal education is an essential element in producing legal professionals able to competently defend and safeguard citizens’ rights and interests. Nonetheless, legal education has largely remained outside legal reform efforts in the course of the last almost two decades. The law schools’ proliferation has not led to competition nor to improvement of the quality of education. On the contrary it has stagnated and even deteriorated in many respects, leading to a practical decline in the professional preparedness of legal practitioners. The quality of the university instruction has an immediate effect on the functioning of all the branches of government as well as for the civil society and the business. Legal education is therefore among the key factors for successful tackling of organized crime and corruption as well as a general precondition for an effective rule of law.

To that end, BILI team has worked for the formation of a legal education reform working group in an attempt to bring together and encourage an in-depth analysis and discussion between representatives of all relevant stakeholders having regard to law schools’ accreditation and curriculum. Currently, the end users of legal education, i.e. the legal society on the whole and the business circles have virtually no say in the entire accreditation process. The traditional classroom-based legal education does not focus on the practically-oriented approaches to problems solving. BILI works with representatives from Bulgarian law schools as well as the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Justice, the National Agency for Evaluation and Accreditation, the Union of Judges, the Supreme Bar Council, and business representative organizations. The Institute continues to provide technical assistance to the legal clinics established with the support of ABA/CEELI.

is a project that at present BILI is working on, funded by the German Marshall Fund-Bulgaria fund and planned to be implemented between July, 2008 and July, 2009. It constitutes a natural continuation of BILI’s efforts to promote legal education reform, perceived as a prime prerequisite for successful completion of the legal reform and ensurance of wide public access to high-qualified legal services.
The project aims to give impetus to the existing endeavours in the field by empowering the civil society as a stakeholder and by facilitating the link between the market and the product of the law schools through surveying and analyzing perceptions of the end-users and stakeholders as to the quality of legal education and by developing a law school’s ranking system. The implementation of the project is coordinated with the Ministry of Justice and is designed to benefit its efforts to develop a law school reform policy.

To find out more about the project click here.


Building over ABA/CEELIs’ Bar development initiatives implemented 2002, BILI recognizes that judicial reform does not include only judges and prosecutors. Attorneys are also a vital element of a well functioning judiciary. Independent and self governing, attorneys serve both as guardians of the rights and interests of the citizens and as guarantors for the courts’ ability to make good on the promises to deliver justice. The performance and professional conduct of attorneys affects directly the judicial system’s ability to provide fair, impartial and expedient administration of justice. Additionally, the public perception of the competence and integrity of attorneys greatly influences the trust and esteem in which a justice system is held by its constituency.

For these reasons, BILI supports the Bulgarian Bar in its efforts to become a modern, active and responsible part of our society. BILI works together with the institutions of the Bar to strengthen the professional development of attorneys, to promote methods for alternative dispute resolution; and to remedy the lack of practical training in Bulgarian legal education.



BILI has focused on promoting ADR and especially mediation as an effective solution for many of the goals of the judicial reform. The Institute has published a lot of promotional materials, aired advertisement about mediation on the radio and developed educational movies on mediation, based on real cases. Members of the BILI team are experienced mediators and trainers in mediation. BILI is providing trainings in mediation skills in the country and abroad. The Institute is also participating in the legislative initiatives related to the establishment of the mediation procedure as a better alternative to the court proceedings. BILI was instrumental in the preparation of the Regulation for the approval of the organizations, providing training, the requirements for training mediators, the rules related to the Unified Register of the Mediators and the procedural and ethical rules for mediators which was adopted by the Ministry of Justice in Bulgaria.



In its efforts to empower broader quarters of the civil society in the process of furthering judicial reforms and in determining their scope and aims, BILI has undertaken the creation of the Legal Reform Watch, a bilingual Internet portal [www.legalreformwatch.info] (official launch – July 2007). The portal assembles and makes available in the public domain an archive of all key information related to judicial and legal reform in Bulgaria: statistics, analyses, reports etc. The Portal is designed to become a ‘one-stop’ on-line resource centre providing analytical and statistical data pertaining to the legal reform and initiatives implemented in Bulgaria over the years, serving as a documentation centre on the legal reforms in Bulgaria and main point of reference for both local and international experts and stakeholders. Its primary goal is to consolidate the analytical and informational resources underlining the need for furthering the judicial reform and outlining the possible solutions to the remaining challenges. BILI is adding its own analytical reports and publications on continuous basis. Our hope is that this Portal will be an important tool in staying the reform course by ensuring continuity in the post EU accession situation, where some of the most important donors and advocates for reforms will have withdrawn and all future efforts will have to depend on internal initiative only. By making all that information accessible in one place, in a user-friendly interface and searchable form, the portal will open the debate on legal reform to a wider range of civil society, thus taking it out of the closed circle of high-level policy makers. An additional function of the Portal is to make the Bulgarian experience of reforming judiciary available internationally as we are making efforts to publish English translations the most important documents.