Pernik District Court granted one of the first gender reassignment request in its practice.

Pernik District Court granted one of the first gender reassignment request in its practice. With a final judgment from the last month, the court obliged Pernik Municipality to issue a new birth certificate to the interested person.

The positive judgment was reached, after the court appointed a multidisciplinary expert examination – by psychologist and psychiatrist – and found that the condition transsexuality “is observed as a permanent tendency in time, but not a result of a passing idea”. The court also credited the testimonies of witnesses – “clear and unequivocal in line of the fact that the person lives with the conscious of a man, experiences and undergoes this condition since years and as such he is perceived by his closest persons and by unknown persons, state officials”.

The trans person describes his impressions from the case as follows: “The case took place faster than I expected. I am fascinated! Everything happened for less than a year. Also, the people were better than I expected. I mean the people who participated in the case – the judge, the prosecutor, the experts. I was very pleasantly surprised by the meeting with the psychologists. The woman was very supportive and understanding, even a student was together with us, who knew the LGBT foundations (Single Step and others) and knew Momchil Baev. The boy was there because, as I understood, he studies sexology and knows things related to trans people and was helping the psychologist. Overall, it went very well, I took some tests. Only, the meeting with the psychiatrist was a little nervous for me, because, according to me, she was looking for a caused, but not for an inherent, reason for my condition. Otherwise, the woman herself seemed to me nice.”

From legal point of view, the Pernik District Court steps entirely on the case law of the ECtHR and the two Bulgarian cases in particular – P.H. and Y.T. – noting that: “The Court in Strasbourg has taken into account the contradictory and unconvincing case law of the Bulgarian courts, stimulated by the growing public intolerance towards transsexual people and generally – the different people, as well as the more frequent use of hate speech”. The Pernik District Court allowed the requested changes in the birth certificate with the reason that the contrary would cause a new breach of the European Convention for Human Rights.

In its judgment, the court does not comment whether the request threatens any general interest, even though this is the major requirement of the European Court of Human Rights, as regards gender reassignment cases. Nevertheless, a prosecutor from the Pernik District Prosecution Office and a legal consultant from the Pernik Municipality actively took part in the case and their function is indeed to observe the compliance with the general interest. They did not point to any threat for the public order whatsoever. On the contrary, it was established in the case that the interested person has a clear criminal record and there are no pending investigations against him, e. i. he is not aiming at escaping criminal responsibility.

The trans person was represented by Natasha Dobreva, attorney, from the Single Step Foundation.