Description
The project addresses the need to improve the quality of the Bulgarian legislative framework, taking into account the impact of legislative acts on the stakeholders. The project aims at improving the dialogue between NGOs and the authorities and achieving greater involvement of NGOs in policy-making through a civil monitoring mechanism. First, the legislation regulating Bulgarian lawmaking will be analyzed and barriers to better quality legislation will be identified. Second, an empirical study of the quality of legislation will be carried out. Third, proposals for a civil monitoring mechanism will be put forward and publicly discussed with NGOs. Fourth, the pilot expert team for civil monitoring will start working. Next, the bylaws and rules on the work of the expert team will be further developed. Finally, the civil monitoring mechanism will be officially launched. The project will benefit NGOs, decision-makers and the public in general.
Summary of project results
The project was needed because the legislative process in Bulgaria as late as 10 years after the accession to the EU has still been marred by the bad practice of adopting legislative acts without any assessment of their expected impact on the relations they regulate, the NGOs, citizens and the public. The long-term project goal was to improve the quality of the legislative acts in Bulgaria by introducing a civil monitoring mechanism whereby it could be evaluated in advance based on an expert analysis to what extent a planned amendment to the legal framework regulating certain public relations would have a favourable impact and what the social, economic and other implications would be. The project provoked the will of the representatives of the central executive power and as a result the Council of Ministers submitted on 01.09.2015 the draft of the Law amending and supplementing the Law on Legislative Acts laying down the introduction of a compulsory impact assessment in the Bulgarian legislative process. More than 100 representatives of the decision-making group and more than1000 NGOs were familiar with the proposals for the creation of a civil monitoring mechanism of the legislative process, the findings of the monitoring, the developed bill and the analytical and expert documents developed under the project. Several analytical documents were developed which have been uploaded on
http://publiconsultation.ria.bg/.
Summary of bilateral results