In memory

Mihail Stoyanov

On 30 September 2008, shortly after 9 p.m., three young men beat and asphyxiated Mihail Stoyanov in Borisova gradina park in Sofia. He was 26.

The three belonged to a group of six secondary-school students who gathered in the park, singled out men they took to be homosexual, and assaulted them. They called it "kicking" or a "clean-up". The courts established that the group had attacked people on that basis before.

Between 8 and 9 p.m. on 30 September, five of them met, decided to find "a man who looked like a homosexual", and split into groups of three and two to ambush him. They struck Stoyanov in the face, chased him, broke his hyoid bone while strangling him, then pressed his torso and head face-down into the ground for about five minutes, blocking his nose and mouth. He resisted for roughly two minutes, lost consciousness, and died of mechanical asphyxiation.

One of the attackers then took his wallet and mobile phone. A passer-by found his body at about 8 a.m. the next morning.

Police identified the first attacker through the stolen phone. They interviewed him as a witness on 28 May 2010 and arrested all three on 3 June 2010 — nearly twenty-one months after the killing.

Fifteen years to a final sentence

1. 30 September 2008

   The killing

   Mihail Stoyanov is beaten and asphyxiated in Borisova gradina. His body is found the next morning.

2. 3 June 2010

   The arrests

   The three attackers are detained — nearly 21 months after the killing. One of them kept the status of witness throughout and was never tried.

3. 4 May 2012

   Protest against the slowness of justice

   Civil society protests as the legal time limit for detention without charges expires. This comes from Bulgarian Wikipedia and we could not check it against a primary source.

4. December 2012

   The indictment

   The indictment is filed more than four years after the killing. First hearings are in late October 2013.

5. 22 June 2015

   Sofia City Court

   Verdict no. 199: both defendants convicted of murder committed in a particularly painful manner, but acquitted on the hooligan-motives count. The sentences — 13 years and 4 years 10 months — are below the statutory minimum.

6. 12 July 2017

   Sofia Court of Appeal

   Judgment no. 330: the conviction is upheld, the form of intent is changed, and the sentences are raised to 15 and 6 years.

7. 21 June 2018

   Supreme Court of Cassation

   Judgment no. 39: the sentences are cut to 10 years and 4 years 6 months — again below the statutory minimum. The court does not mention the homophobic motives at all in its analysis.

8. 14 June 2022

   The European Court of Human Rights condemns Bulgaria

   In Stoyanova v. Bulgaria (no. 56070/18), brought by his mother Hristina Stoyanova, the Court holds unanimously that there was a violation of Article 14 taken together with Article 2. The judgment becomes final on 14 September 2022.

9. 23 August 2023

   The case is reopened

   On the Prosecutor General’s request, the Supreme Court of Cassation reopens the criminal proceedings by decision no. 302.

10. 16 November 2023

    The final sentences

    By decision no. 427 the Supreme Court of Cassation sets aside its own 2018 judgment and leaves the Court of Appeal’s sentences in force: Aleksandar Georgiev 15 years, Radoslav Kirchev 6 years, both under strict regime. Fifteen years and six weeks passed between the killing and the final sentence.

What the courts said

What was left over

The ECtHR awarded Hristina Stoyanova EUR 7,000 for non-pecuniary damage (she had claimed EUR 60,000) and EUR 3,183.90 in costs. Under Article 46 the Court found the breach to be systemic and directed Bulgaria to ensure that violent attacks motivated by hostility towards a victim’s actual or presumed sexual orientation are treated as aggravated in criminal-law terms.

On the civil claim, Sofia City Court awarded BGN 250,000 on 8 March 2019; Sofia Court of Appeal reduced it to BGN 200,000 on 7 October 2019. As of November 2021 his mother had recovered nothing through enforcement proceedings begun in 2020.

The excessive length of the proceedings was repeatedly treated by the Bulgarian courts as a mitigating factor for the killers. In other words: the delay literally reduced their sentences.

Other documented cases

In chronological order. Each entry says where the facts come from and how far the case got.

A correction to our own brief: the attack on Rainbow Hub was on 30 October 2021, not October 2023. We searched for a documented October 2023 attack and found none. We record the error here rather than hiding it.

1. 28 June 2008Sofia

   Reported, unconfirmed

   The first Sofia Pride is attacked with a petrol bomb and stones

   Bulgaria’s first Pride march took place on 28 June 2008 — three months before Mihail Stoyanov was killed. Reportedly around 150 marchers were protected by roughly as many police officers. Far-right extremists and football hooligans threw a petrol bomb, rocks and bottles at the parade. Because of the heavy police presence, no injuries to participants were reported.

   This is here as context for 2008, not as a casualty case — and with a caveat. The date of 28 June 2008 is reported consistently everywhere, but the other figures reached us only through search-engine summaries, without our being able to open a primary source. The number detained even contradicts itself: some sources say 60, others 88. So we publish neither, and the marcher count should be read as approximate.

2. 5 April 2019Sofia

   Reported, unconfirmed

   Vandalism against Rainbow Hub

   A stone was thrown through a window of the Rainbow Hub community centre bearing a "Safe space" sticker. A rainbow flag was stolen and signage was torn down. Documented by Genderland.

3. 30 October 2021Sofia

   Charged, no conviction

   The attack on Rainbow Hub

   On a Saturday at about 5:30–6 p.m., days before the presidential election, roughly ten men from the Bulgarian National Union, led by its chairman and presidential candidate Boyan Rasate (legal name Boyan Stankov), forced their way into the Rainbow Hub LGBTI community centre in central Sofia during a community meeting on trans issues. They smashed equipment and furniture and struck Gloria Filipova of the Bilitis Foundation in the face. Rainbow Hub is run jointly by Deystvie, Bilitis and GLAS.

   The attack came 10 days after a petition with over 8,000 signatures calling for anti-LGBTI hate-crime provisions in the Criminal Code, and 4 days after the Constitutional Court ruled that "gender" must be understood in biological terms only.

   The legal path: in 2022 Sofia City Court released Rasate from criminal liability with an administrative fine of BGN 3,000; on 10 July 2023 the Sofia Court of Appeal convicted him, imposing six months’ probation and BGN 2,000 compensation; on 17 June 2024 the Supreme Court of Cassation quashed that and remitted the case.

   It is reported that on 14 March 2026 a differently composed Sofia Court of Appeal panel acquitted Rasate on both counts, citing contradictions between witness accounts, and that the prosecution and the victim’s counsel intended to appeal. WE COULD NOT verify this against a primary source — only a low-quality outlet opened for us, while mainstream media returned errors. If the acquittal stands, Boyan Rasate must not be described as convicted.

4. May 2023Bulgaria, location not stated

   Reported, unconfirmed

   Group assault to "clean the park of gays"

   ILGA-Europe records in its annual review covering 2023 that in May 2023 a group of young men assaulted several people, including minors, in order to "clean the park of gays" — the same phrase the group that killed Mihail Stoyanov used for itself in 2008.

   ILGA-Europe gives no date, place or case reference, and we could not corroborate it in Bulgarian media. We publish it explicitly as reported by ILGA-Europe, not as an established case.

5. 10 and 23 June 2023Sofia and Varna

   Reported, unconfirmed

   Screenings of the film Close disrupted

   On 10 June 2023 far-right extremists held hateful banners outside a screening of the film Close at the Sofia Pride Film Fest, allegedly assaulted a woman, then went inside to disrupt the event, photographed attendees, called them "paedophiles" and chanted "LGBT virus". The event was cancelled. Police were present and, according to the report, shook hands with the protesters. On 23 June 2023 a screening of the same film was disrupted by extremists in Varna.

   In the same period Pride posters and billboards were vandalised, and fake handwritten banners falsely calling for violence on the organisers’ behalf were put up across the city.

   The source is ILGA-Europe, which itself uses "allegedly" for the assault on the woman.

6. 15 November 2023Razgrad

   Final conviction

   The first conviction under the new sexual-orientation provision

   A minor, identified in the court act as B.S., found on Instagram the profile of a boy with long tied-back hair and narrow jeans. After his follow request was declined he messaged him: "Accept the request, you gay — just come to Tsar Kaloyan and I’ll kill you!"

   On 15 November 2023 B.S. and friends waited for him outside his school in Razgrad, followed him whistling and shouting, and B.S. asked "Why are you like this, why are you gay?", struck him on the neck, swore at him, and later kicked him in the leg. The victim called 112.

   On 17 December 2024 the Razgrad District Court found B.S. guilty of causing light bodily harm on grounds related to the victim’s sexual orientation — Article 131(1)(12) of the Criminal Code. It is the first known conviction under the new provision. The sentence was public censure, which the judge ordered to be carried out by reading the verdict over the Razgrad public-address radio system.

   Only initials are used, because the perpetrator was a minor. Do not attempt to identify either party.

7. Spring 2024Sofia

   Suspended or refused

   Death threats against Ivo Dimchev — the prosecution refused to investigate

   The performer Ivo Dimchev received a series of insults and death threats from strangers via social media. He reported one specific threat to his local police station and asked that the author be identified and prosecuted.

   On 25 June 2024 the Sofia District Prosecutor’s Office refused to open a formal investigation, reasoning that the threat did not give rise to a well-founded fear that it would be carried out, and that the author could not be identified. Documented by Bilitis, following a Nova TV report of 9 July 2024.

8. 27 September 2024Sofia, tram no. 5

   Suspended or refused

   Assault on LGBTI activist Kalin Kisyov

   A young man of apparent age 16–17 stared at him, then followed him through the carriage. The victim asked other passengers to help de-escalate; nobody reacted. The attacker began shouting homophobic abuse, struck him on the head and blocked his path before leaving. He reported it to the police.

   By order of the Sofia District Prosecutor’s Office of 25 June 2025 the proceedings were suspended for insufficient evidence to establish the author of the act. Roughly nine months passed between the assault and the suspension.

   Kalin Kisyov is named in the Bilitis report, of which he is himself one of the editors — so this is his own account, on the record.

9. 10 December 2024Sofia

   Charged, no conviction

   Borislav Sapundzhiev and his partner beaten in a restaurant

   At around 9 p.m. Borislav Sapundzhiev and his partner were having dinner in a Sofia restaurant when two other customers attacked them. Speaking on Nova TV, Sapundzhiev said they were attacked because of their sexual orientation, and that before the physical aggression began the men asked whether he was the hairdresser Borislav Ursula. The attackers hit them with objects from the venue including chairs, kicked them and punched them. The owner gave police the CCTV.

   On 16 December 2024 the Sofia District Prosecutor’s Office charged two men, A.A. and B.P., aged 42 and 35, with causing bodily harm on grounds related to the victim’s sexual orientation (Article 131(1)(12)); A.A. was additionally charged with threatening to kill both victims. They were detained for 72 hours and the prosecutor asked the court for pre-trial detention. The outcome of the case is not established in the sources we could open.

10. 3 March 2025Varna

    Charged, no conviction

    Attempted murder charged with a sexual-orientation motive

    In the early hours of 3 March 2025, at the market in Varna, 18-year-old E.G. and three other boys under 18 encountered a boy they did not know and beat him. E.G. then stabbed him six times; the wounds penetrated the chest cavity and each of them could have caused death. According to the prosecution, the four had attacked people of apparent homosexual orientation before.

    E.G. is charged with attempted murder on grounds related to sexual orientation — Article 116(1)(11), which carries 15 years to life. The other three are charged with light bodily harm under Article 131(1)(12). Two court instances in Varna kept E.G. in custody, the last being the Varna Court of Appeal on 11 March 2025. As of October 2025 the case was still awaiting judgment.

    Initials are used because of the ages involved. The charge concerns the attackers’ motive, not the victim’s identity or orientation.

11. 21 April 2025Sofia

    Reported, unconfirmed

    Trans woman attacked with a bladed weapon in the city centre

    In the early hours of 21 April 2025, while waiting for public transport in central Sofia, a trans woman was noticed by a man living in a nearby entrance. He approached her and said that freaks like her should not live and that he would kill them all. He returned shortly afterwards with a sharp bladed weapon, slashed her on the head and legs, knocked her to the ground and kicked her.

    She gave an interview to Nova TV on 24 April 2025. On the basis of it the Ministry of Interior acted of its own motion and detained the attacker. The deputy head of the 6th precinct told Nova TV the detainee was 42 and had a record for hooliganism. The case is independently corroborated by ILGA-Europe’s annual review covering 2025.

    The legal point that matters most: because the 2023 amendments added sexual orientation only, and not gender identity, an anti-trans motive has no aggravating status in Bulgarian criminal law. On its face this case falls outside the new provision.

    Bilitis names her only as "Despina". We add nothing that could identify her.

12. 4 August 2026Plovdiv

    Charged, no conviction

    The death of Georgi Kuzev — five minors charged

    On 4 August 2026 at about 5:20 p.m. a 112 call reported a man in a helpless state with visible signs of violence at the foot of Mladezhki halm in Plovdiv. The 37-year-old man was taken to hospital and died hours later. Media name him as Georgi Kuzev from Krichim; the prosecution’s own statements do not name him.

    On 6 August 2026 the Plovdiv District Prosecutor’s Office charged five minors — three boys and two girls, aged 14 to 17 — with intentional murder committed in a particularly painful manner for the victim, with particular cruelty, from hooligan motives and motives related to sexual orientation, under Article 116(1) points 6 and 11 in conjunction with Articles 115 and 63. All five were remanded in custody, upheld by the Plovdiv Court of Appeal.

    As far as we can tell, this is the first murder prosecution in Bulgaria under the sexual-orientation limb introduced in 2023. The Bulgarian Helsinki Committee has publicly called for a timely, effective and independent investigation.

    These are charges, not convictions. The accused are children and are presumed innocent. The charge concerns the alleged motive of the perpetrators, not anything established about Georgi Kuzev himself — the prosecution says nothing about his orientation. The case is days old at the time of publication and the facts will move — this page will need re-checking. Some outlets rendered the charge as "sexual motives"; the official prosecution wording is "motives related to sexual orientation".

What the numbers show

There are only three kinds of numbers on anti-LGBTI violence in Bulgaria: official data that does not separate the grounds; NGO data whose authors warn it is not representative; and one European survey that asks people directly. None of them tells you how many cases there were. Together they tell you something else — that almost nothing reaches the police.

The Prosecutor’s Office: "crimes with a discriminatory element"

The Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Bulgaria began separately processing and analysing hate crimes only from 1 January 2022. Before that, no separate data were collected. Its annual reports give:

These figures cover EVERY discriminatory ground in the Criminal Code — race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, sexual orientation — and the reports do not break them out. Bilitis says it plainly: no conclusion can be drawn from them about how many anti-LGBTI crimes there were. Do not read them as statistics about us.

OSCE/ODIHR: an anti-LGBTI bias category never appears

In ODIHR’s country reports for Bulgaria, no anti-LGBTI bias category appears in the official data in any year.

For 2021 the police recorded 727 incidents by type of crime (705 physical assault, 21 incitement to violence, 1 homicide) with bias motivation entirely "unspecified". ODIHR notes that Bulgaria’s law enforcement agencies have not recorded the bias motivations of hate crimes.

For 2023 hate crimes recorded by police are "not available"; 12 were prosecuted and 3 sentenced. ODIHR notes that Bulgaria has not reported statistics on police-recorded hate crimes to it.

For 2024 the police recorded 28 (24 anti-Semitic, 4 racist and xenophobic), 35 were prosecuted and 5 sentenced, a figure that includes four acquittals. ODIHR notes that Bulgaria’s hate crime recording and statistics do not sufficiently distinguish hate crimes from other crimes.

Among the organisations that submitted civil-society data for 2024, not one is a Bulgarian LGBTI organisation.

The Ministry of Interior: zero

Answering a freedom-of-information request from Bilitis, the Ministry of Interior stated that it had carried out zero checks on hate crimes and that central police statistics contained no data on such reports for the period August 2023 to May 2025 — that is, from the day the new Criminal Code provision took effect until the date of the request.

How much never gets reported

The rest of the same FRA figures for Bulgaria: 60% say they were harassed in the year before the survey; 46% often or always avoid certain locations for fear of being assaulted; 75% often or always avoid holding hands with a same-sex partner in public; only 27% are fairly or very open about being LGBTIQ; only 6% believe their government effectively combats prejudice.

GLAS explains why people do not report: distrust of the institution, or the belief that it could do nothing anyway. As of 2017 Bulgarian law recognised no anti-LGBTI hate crime at all, so police and prosecutors had no duty to record, classify, analyse or report such crimes — and therefore no official statistics on the true scale existed.

One counter-intuitive finding in the GLAS data deserves saying out loud: most perpetrators acted alone rather than as part of an organised group, and in many cases the victim already knew them — a relative, a classmate, a colleague, someone from the same bar. Most incidents happened at school, then on the street, then at home.

Bilitis adds the hardest part: when violence happens within the family or an intimate relationship, the likelihood of a report is minimal, because victims fear being outed, further stigmatised, and left without an adequate institutional response.

What the law does and does not do

Briefly: until August 2023 a homophobic motive had no criminal-law consequence at all. Since August 2023 it has one — for sexual orientation. For gender identity there is still none.

Before August 2023

The 1968 Criminal Code never contained specific protection for LGBTI people. Article 116(1)(11) as originally enacted covered only hooligan motives. Racist and xenophobic motives were added in 2011, when the Code was amended to transpose EU Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA. Sexual orientation was not added then.

A draft new Criminal Code prepared by the Ministry of Justice and submitted to Parliament in January 2014 would have made murder, bodily harm and torture aggravated when motivated by a "protected characteristic" that included sexual orientation. Parliament never examined it.

So in the Stoyanov case the prosecution had to take the only route available — hooligan motives. Both the Sofia Court of Appeal (2017) and the Supreme Court of Cassation (2018) rejected it: the attack was not accompanied by indecent acts grossly violating public order. The result was absurd and therefore important: the courts established the homophobic motive as a fact, and the fact produced no legal consequence.

The 2023 reform

The 49th National Assembly adopted the amending law on 28 July 2023; it was promulgated in State Gazette no. 67 of 4 August 2023. Sexual orientation was inserted as an aggravating or qualifying ground across roughly ten provisions of the Criminal Code — including Article 116 (murder), 131 (bodily harm), 142 (abduction), 142a (unlawful deprivation of liberty), 162 (incitement to discrimination, violence or hatred), 163 (mob violence), 172 (workplace discrimination), 216 (destruction of property) and 320 (incitement to crime).

Aggravated murder under Article 116(1) carries 15 to 30 years, life, or life without parole. Incitement to hatred on grounds of sexual orientation via media or online is punishable by 1 to 4 years plus a fine of BGN 5,000–10,000. In 2024 Article 320 was amended further.

Deystvie called the reform an enormous victory for the LGBT movement in Bulgaria and linked it directly to Mihail Stoyanov’s case and the 2022 ECtHR judgment. It cannot be applied retroactively to a killing in 2008.

What the reform did NOT do

The 2023 amendments added "sexual orientation" only. Gender identity and gender expression were left out of the Criminal Code and remain outside it. ODIHR’s summary of Bulgarian hate-crime legislation lists the protected characteristics as race, skin colour, origin, nationality, ethnic affiliation, religion, political beliefs and sexual orientation. Gender identity is absent.

This is not theoretical. The bladed-weapon attack on a trans woman in central Sofia in April 2025 falls, on its face, outside the sexual-orientation ground.

Bilitis recommends in its October 2025 report that the Criminal Code be amended to add gender identity and gender expression, and that Article 6 of the Constitution name sexual orientation and gender identity explicitly — the Constitution currently relies on the open-ended ground of "personal status".

See what rights you have today

If this happened to you

Bilitis and GLAS run stophate.bg, a platform for anonymous reporting and monitoring of hate crimes against LGBTI people. The questionnaire is adapted to the Bulgarian context following ILGA-Europe and OSCE/ODIHR methodologies, with separate forms for different kinds of violence. Data are collected anonymously.

We will not tell you the system will help — this page is the evidence that it often does not. But a report is the only way the case exists in any record at all. This page is short precisely because thousands of reports were never made.

stophate.bg

If you know of a case missing here, and there is a document, a court act or a report behind it — tell us. This page was built to grow, and every new line in it is a line the state did not write.