The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) held on Tuesday that the Supreme Administrative Court of Bulgaria did not violate an applicant’s right to a fair trial and judicial impartiality. Bulgaria’s Supreme Administrative Court decided the case brought by Mihail Doynov and was simultaneously a defendant, as Doynov’s legal challenge had alleged that the court had breached several of his rights protected by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

The ECHR held that there was no specific proof of judicial impartiality in the case. Doynov had claimed that the Supreme Administrative Court being a defendant constituted an automatic conflict of interest, but the ECHR noted that challenging judicial impartiality requires concrete proof of how a judge or court’s impartiality impacted a case. In justifying its decision, the ECHR cited a number of procedural rules in Bulgarian law designed to protect judicial impartiality, including Article 22 of the Code of Civil Procedure, which requires judges to excuse themselves from a case if there is a plausible conflict of interest.

The ECHR came to this decision unanimously, indicating that there were no disagreements about the decision or the reasoning that led to this decision among the judges that heard the case.

Doynov initially challenged the grounds of his arrest, but his challenge was dismissed by the Supreme Administrative Court. Subsequently, Doynov alleged that the Supreme Administrative Court had violated his rights to legal counsel, freedom, freedom of expression, right to courts and to a fair trial in the process of examining his claim under the EU Charter.

Doynov was first detained under suspicion of authoring a fake bomb threat.