The European Commission has published the report prepared for Bulgaria under the so-called Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM), which measures progress in reforming the judiciary, fighting corruption and cracking down on organized crime.
According to the report Bulgaria has not met any of the six benchmarks monitored, but it differentiates between those where substantial progress has been made and those where much more has to be done.
The country needs to address a number of challenges such as tensions in the supreme judicial body, the formalism of criminal procedures, a problematic legal framework for investigation and prosecution of corruption and organized crime and restructuring the prosecuting authority, the EU Commission has established.
The Commission also says it intends to bring forward the next report to the end of 2017 to assess progress in benchmark where success has been noted. It describes the CVM as having "an important role in Bulgaria as a driver for reform, as well as a tool to track progress."
The full text of the report is available here.