Bulgaria's constitutional court on Friday overturned a parliamentary decision to scrap the statute of limitations for serious communist-era crimes, in a move that limits the scope for prosecuting them.
Changes to Bulgaria's penal code, passed by parliament in September 2015, did away with any time limit on prosecutions of former top officials for crimes committed between the communists' seizure of power in 1944 and the regime's toppling in 1989.
No such officials have ever been convicted for crimes committed under a regime that ruled Bulgaria with an iron fist.
Parliament pushed through the changes after several investigations into communist-era death camps had to be scrapped because the statute of limitations had passed, prompting disquiet in Bulgaria.
Prosecutors also had to drop the probe into the notorious killing of dissident Georgy Markov -- poisoned with the tip of an umbrella on London's Waterloo Bridge in 1978 -- in 2013 when the 25-year time limit ran out.
The leaders of Bulgaria's 13-percent Muslim minority also hoped that scrapping the deadline would help bring to justice those responsible for forced assimilation in the mid-1980s, when ethnic Turks were made to change their Muslim names to Bulgarian ones.
But Chief Prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov slammed the changes as "unconstitutional" and challenged them at the top court.
On Thursday, 11 out of the 12 constitutional judges voted to overturn the changes and leave the deadline standing.
In their motives published Friday, the judges said that Bulgaria's post-communist governments had always had "the opportunity to seek responsibility from the perpetrators of such crimes" within the statute of limitations.
Lack of clarity over who could be considered a "top official" might also open the way for "arbitrariness", the judges said.
Communist-era crimes "do not constitute crimes against humanity," the judges added, saying that only offences this serious could be prosecuted without a time limit.
The longest statute of limitations in Bulgaria's penal code is 35 years, meaning that 2024 will be the absolute deadline for punishing such offences if they were committed in 1989, the last year of the regime.
