A presentation by Dr Ivo Gruev, postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Fundamental Rights, Hertie School. This event is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights.
Despite the absence of debates on gender equality during and after Bulgaria’s democratic transition, this country’s constitutional text and court have become venues for unprecedented and increasing contestation of gender relations over the last years. This paper focuses on two recent, interconnected decisions of the Bulgarian Constitutional Court, which have come to define and entrench this country’s constitutional gender regime: a ruling from 2018 that declared the Istanbul Convention of the Council of Europe to be unconstitutional and a follow-up judgment from 2021 that consolidated the constitutional interpretation of “sex” to a biologically determined binary and rejected the socially construed notion of gender by coupling Bulgaria’s formally secular constitutional identity with Christian Orthodoxy. The paper argues that that these two rulings have effectively and irrevocably shifted the focus of Bulgaria’s emerging constitutional discourse on gender from the pressing structural and substantive issues, shortcomings and communist legacies surrounding its legal treatment to that of the politically inflated, ambiguous and non-justiciable concept of “gender ideology”. The analysis demonstrates that the constitutionalisation of gender in Bulgaria is a relatively recent phenomenon that is driven by highly politicized discourses and distortion tactics, and that this process has a lasting detrimental, preventive effect on gender equality and the overall protection of fundamental rights in the country.
Dr Ivo Gruev is a comparative constitutional scholar and postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Fundamental Rights, Hertie School. His current work focuses on the erosion of liberal constitutionalism and the changing relationship between governments, courts, and human rights in both established and non-consolidated democracies. He was awarded a 2022-2023 Re:constitution Fellowship to explore the question of whether the backlash against gender equality that has manifested, with varying degrees of success, before different constitutional courts in Eastern Europe can be seen as a challenge to the rule of law in this region. Dr Gruev is also a member of the “Feminists Judgments in Central and Eastern Europe” group and principal investigator on the CIVICA-funded project “ReLiCon: Religion, Illiberal Constitutionalism and the Retrogression of Fundamental Rights in East Central Europe”. He holds a doctorate (DPhil) and a Magister Juris from the University of Oxford, and a German law degree (1. Staatsexamen).
Prior registration is required. Registered attendees will receive the dial-in details as well as a draft paper, on which the presentation is based, via e-mail prior to the event.
