Personality Rights in Central and Eastern Europe. A domestic report: Bulgaria

A particular feature of the Bulgarian system of civil law is the fact that it has not been codified and therefore consists of acts which regulate individual laws, i.e., contract law, property law, family law, law of succession, commercial law and labour legislation. The Bulgarian law lacks the definition of personality rights, and it is only the doctrine and case-law that can settle the question. It is accepted that personality rights are personal rights, non-alienable, intuitu personae, protected within the class of torts by indemnities and possessive actions. It is commonly thought that personality rights result from the essence of human nature and that their protection exceeds the civil law, involving also other branches of law. The Bulgarian doctrine divides personality rights into static (protecting indefeasible rights, such as bodily inviolability) and dynamic (protecting rights that can be executed by the subject of these laws, like freedom of choosing the place of abode). These rights are treated, basically, as non-property ones and as closely related to a physical person, and therefore, as a result, they expire after the physical person’s death. The copyright is an exception to the rule.