Bulgaria's Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov initiated the amendments. Photo by BGNES
Employees of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry who were active as secret State Security agents during the Communist regime will no longer be allowed to take key diplomatic positions.
The amendments to Bulgaria's Diplomatic Service Act were adopted at second reading Thursday. Bulgaria's 35 ambassadors proven to have been collaborators of the communist regime's secret service can now be removed from their posts.
Bulgaria's Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov declared Thursday that those proven to be former Communist agents will not be eligible for ambassadors, consuls, general consuls, interim ambassadors and other important positions.
The amendments initiated by Mladenov are designed to rectify the huge scandal that shook the Bulgarian government in the fall of 2010 with regards to the diplomats' lustration (i.e. limiting the participation of former communists, and especially informants of the communist secret police in the civil service).
The Foreign Minister was outraged after at the end of 2010 the so-called Files Commission, the special panel examining the Communist era documentation, revealed that almost half of Bulgaria's ambassadors abroad, in a number of key countries – from the UK to Russia and China, had been collaborators of the former State Security Service.