Four Bulgarian Ambassadors with proven ties to the communist regime's secret service, State Security (DS), are suing the Foreign Ministry over their recall.

According to a Friday media statement of the Foreign Ministry, as cited by news portal Mediapool, the lawsuits have been filed by Atanas Pavlov, Andrey Karaslavov, Georgi Dimitrov, Zlatin Trapkov, Bulgaria's Ambassadors to Switzerland and Liechtenstein; to Greece; to Belgrade and to the Netherlands, respectively.

The Foreign Ministry initiated the recall procedures after President Georgi Parvanov, a former collaborator of DS under the codename of agent Gotse, refused to abide by the government's decision and the Parliament's stance and did not sign the Decrees for the dismissal of the 37 discredited diplomats.

All of the four claims have been filed with the Supreme Administrative Court (VAS) and are based on the fact that Bulgaria's Constitution defines the President as the sole authority empowered to recall heads of diplomatic representations.

The Constitutional Court is yet to come up with a ruling on the legality of the amendments to the Diplomatic Service Act banning former State Security agents from taking up key diplomatic positions.

The case was brought to the Constitutional Court by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) and the ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), which insisted that the Bill Amending and Supplementing the Diplomatic Service Act had to be declared unconstitutional in its entirety.

The controversial set of legal amendments was adopted by the Parliament in mid-July, paving the way for kicking out of office the country's 35 ambassadors proven to have been collaborators of the communist regime's secret service – State Security, DS.

The changes initiated by Foreign Minister, Nikolay Mladenov, were 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 when 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.

At the end of July, Parvanov imposed a veto on legal amendments, which ban former State Security agents from the times of the Communist regime to take up key diplomatic positions.

 On September 01, Bulgaria's Parliament overturned the presidential veto, with a total of 129 "against" votes of MPs from the ruling Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria, GERB, party, the far-right, nationalist Ataka and the right-wing Blue Coalition.

The opposition, the left-wing Bulgarian Socialist Party, BSP, and the ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms, DPS, supported the presidential veto.

On November 03, President-Elect Rosen Plevneliev announced that the first thing he would do after assuming office in January 2012 would be to recall all Bulgarian Ambassadors with State Security records.

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