10 | PROTECTING STATELESS PERSONS FROM ARBITRARY DETENTION IN BULGARIA importance by the Migration Directorate at the Ministry of the Interior, which is the main decision-making authority in the field of removal and detention, and the Consular Directorate at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which assists the process of obtaining travel documents for the removal of immigration detainees. Both institutions declined invitations for interviews, but sent written replies, which are analysed in the report. Furthermore, the Directorate on Bulgarian Citizenship at the Ministry of Justice and the Commission at the Administration of the President of the Republic have sent information in writing instead of agreeing to give an interview. We are most grateful to the stateless persons who have agreed to take part in the research and have enhanced our understanding of the issue through sharing their personal experiences with us. 1.3 STATELESSNESS AND DETENTION IN BULGARIA Bulgaria does not yet have a statelessness determination procedure in its national legislation, but a new draft law has been adopted by the Parliament on 15 June 2016. Bulgaria acceded to the 1954 Convention and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (1961 Convention) in February 2012. While the transposition of the 1954 Convention in concrete national law provisions is an act that is welcome, especially after four years of hesitance in this regard, the definition of a stateless person in the current draft law is inconsistent with the international law definition. We will look at this more closely later in section 3.1. of the report. The Republic of Bulgaria is a member state of the Council of Europe. The ECHR was ratified by Bulgaria and entered into force on 7 September 1992. Bulgaria is also a member state of the EU since 1 January 2007. It is bound by the human rights standards in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, and by EU legislation in the migration and asylum field, in particular, the EU Return Directive8 and the EU recast Reception Conditions Directive.9 The adoption of the EU Return Directive brought substantial improvement to the protection of immigration detainees in Bulgaria. Before the transposition of the EU Return Directive in Bulgaria in 2009, there was no time limit to immigration detention in the country and the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) considered judicial review of detention orders to be inadmissible. Currently the awareness and knowledge of the public and the authorities with regard to immigration detention is much higher, but this report also reveals many areas in which progress has still to be made. In Bulgaria detention of stateless and unreturnable persons takes place within the general immigration detention regime. There is no specific legal regulation that provides for specific guarantees for the protection of stateless persons. Stateless persons in Bulgaria have been placed in immigration detention both when they have entered the country irregularly, prior to being given access to the asylum procedure, and upon their detection on the territory of Bulgaria as illegally staying persons. As a matter of long-standing practice, removal orders are usually accompanied by detention orders, without an examination of less coercive measures. With the substantial increase of asylum seekers in Bulgaria since 2013, detention has been seen by the Bulgarian authorities as a tool for migration management. At the time of drafting this report, in September 2016, Bulgaria is in the process of formally introducing an additional type of immigration detention lasting up to thirty days, the purpose of which is “to conduct the initial identification and establishment of identity and to assess the subsequent administrative measures that should be imposed or taken”10 with regard to migrants who have entered the country irregularly. The maximum time limit of ‘regular’ immigration detention in Bulgaria is eighteen months, broken down into six month blocks.