Prepared by: Bulgarian Center for Not-for-Profit Law (BCNL)
On 5 November, the Bulgarian Parliament adopted a decision to establish an ad hoc temporary parliamentary commission “to establish facts and circumstances regarding the activities of George Soros and Alexander Soros and their foundations in the Republic of Bulgaria, financing Bulgarian individuals, legal entities, and non-governmental organisations, as well as establishing their connections with political parties, magistrates, educational institutions, media, business structures, and state authorities.”
The Commission is authorised to summon individuals and representatives of legal entities for public questioning. Both the name and mandate of the Commission, as well as the motives for its establishment, contain defamatory elements aimed at delegitimising and stigmatising civil society organisations (CSOs) that receive funding from abroad. The decision was adopted just one day after it was proposed by MPs from DPS–NN, a party led by Delyan Peevski, who is sanctioned under the Global Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that allows the government to impose sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for serious human rights abuses or corruption.
George Soros is a Hungarian-American philanthropist and founder of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), one of the world’s largest private funders of civil society, human rights, education, and democracy initiatives. OSF has supported organisations promoting transparency, justice, and open governance in many countries, including Bulgaria. The foundation is frequently targeted by politicians and media using disinformation and vilifying narratives, portraying the foundation’s support for democratic reforms as foreign interference.
The decision to establish the Parliamentary Commission is the first successfully adopted decision by the Bulgarian Parliament targeting foreign-funded CSOs. The proposal was supported by two parties from the current ruling coalition and three opposition parties, while the largest party in the coalition and the main opposition party did not support it. Since the current Parliament came to power in late 2024, there have been five unsuccessful attempts to create similar commissions to investigate foreign-funded CSOs. The Commission’s mandate would cover the period from April 1990 to the present, and includes motives with numerous defamatory claims suggesting that Soros-funded organisations have infiltrated the judiciary, political parties, and the media, allegedly endangering the rule of law and aiming to establish a “dictatorship.” This development seeks to delegitimise and stigmatise the work of CSOs receiving foreign funds and could be used to harass their representatives, activists, and human rights defenders, breaching international and EU standards on fundamental rights.