The Shalom Organisation of the Jews in Bulgaria has welcomed a 20 February 2026 ruling by the Supreme Administrative Court, which upheld a 2023 decision by the Commission against Discrimination that found Kostadin Kostadinov, leader of the minority pro-Russian Vuzrazhdane party, had committed discrimination and used hate speech against MP Daniel Lorer on the basis of his ethnic origin in a series of posts on social media.
The Commission had determined that Kostadinov’s posts on Facebook harassed Lorer due to his religion, ethnicity, and origin, ordering him to remove six posts and filter offensive comments. Kostadinov appealed the ruling through the courts in Varna, claiming that his posts targeted Lorer as a political opponent, rather than for personal characteristics. His posts had referred to Lorer with terms such as “foreigner,” “national traitor,” “foreign agent,” “anti-human,” and likened him to a reptile, stating that he wanted Bulgarians and the state to disappear.
The Supreme Administrative Court, in a final decision, confirmed the Commission and lower courts’ findings, citing Bulgarian anti-discrimination law and the European Convention on Human Rights.
In a Facebook post on 26 February, Shalom said the ruling sent a clear signal that public speech, especially from senior government figures, carries liability. “The terms ‘national traitor,’ ‘foreign agent,’ or ‘anti-human,’ addressed to a person on the basis of their Jewish or any other origin are not simply inadmissible in democratic debate – they constitute a violation of the law and undermine the fundamental principles of the rule of law,” Shalom said.
Shalom added that it had long called for such rhetoric, including abuses of Holocaust comparisons, to be differentiated and sanctioned within the law. The organisation described the decision as an important step towards public responsibility and intolerance of hate speech, urging all MPs to fulfil their constitutional mandate by representing all Bulgarians regardless of ethnicity, religion, sex, or other personal characteristics, while protecting the dignity and equality of every citizen.
Lorer, a former president of Shalom’s Sofia branch, said he had been expelled from We Continue the Change-Democratic Bulgaria for refusing to compromise his principles and cooperate with Vuzrazhdane in Parliament. Commenting on the court ruling, he stated that freedom of speech is not a licence for humiliation and that political opponents should be challenged with vision, not dehumanisation based on ethnicity or faith. “I was expelled from my party because of my position, but today I am fully rehabilitated. Expulsion from a party is a political act, but the abandonment of principles is moral bankruptcy,” he said.
