Bulgaria's Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) rebuffed most of the criticisms from the European Commission's (EC) interim report on judiciary reform earlier this week, mediapool.bg reported.

The SJC met on February 7 2008 to discuss the report, with EU Affairs Minister Gergana Grancharova also attending. Although the council's members admitted the country's judiciary had its flaws, the general tone of their statements was one of annoyance, mediapool.bg said.

"We shouldn't react like schoolchildren who had their ears pulled. But if 20 sentences in four months on corruption charges are considered slow progress by the prosecution, I'd like to hear someone tell us how to speed matters up," the chairman of the Supremem Court of Cassation, Lazar Gruev, said.

Courts should not become tribunals that sacrifice the laws in order to get speedy sentences, he added. "A courthouse is not an emergency room," Gruev said.

Prosecutor-General Boris Velchev did admit the high number of lawsuits that are sent back to prosecutors because of procedural mistakes, even in high-profile cases, but dismissed the European executive's concerns about the lack of a single high-level conviction.

"I don't see a standard that can be used as reference to judge what we have accomplished. We can't plan corruption tip-offs, nor project how many bills of indictment will be filed in court by the end of the year. All we can do is investigate as fully as possible what we have," Velchev said, as quoted by mediapool.bg.

Plamen Stoilov, who represents the investigative branch of the judiciary in the SJC, blamed the EC criticism on "certain political circles" that are intentionally giving it misleading information in order to discredit the investigators.

"Let's not lynch ourselves, let's admit that there were good things too, all due to those magistrates who are doing their job," Grancharova said, as quoted by mediapool.bg.

The EC report criticised the country's new Civil Procedure Code, due to go into effect on March 1, but too few judges are familiar enough with it to implement it, Justice Minister Miglena Tacheva said. As a consequence, the ministry will most probably delay the date it enters into force to January 1 2009.

SJC's meeting also saw new calls for a new Penal Code, which the EC likewise criticised as outdated, and a radical overhaul of the Penal Procedure Code.