ions, engage in antisocial
or criminal behavior, the courts are charged with handing down
appropriate sentences, and the penal institutions are concerned with
rehabilitating the individuals for eventual return to society as
cooperative and productive members.

People's Militia units throughout the country are the local police
forces that enforce the laws, combat crime, and monitor the population.
They are assisted in local law enforcement by part-time voluntary
paramilitary auxiliaries and, in serious situations, by a small,
centrally organized, full-time internal security force that can act as a
light infantry unit and move quickly to any part of the country. State
security police, evolved from the secret police of the 1940s and 1950s
but much reduced in size, deal with crimes that are national in scope or
that pose a threat to the society or its institutions. Authorities
credit the security police with having almost eliminated the possibility
of large-scale subversive activities. The militia, its volunteer
auxiliaries, and the security units are organized within the Ministry of
Internal Affairs.

Border and construction troop organizations are administered separately.
The Border Troops, charged with defense of the country's boundaries and
with control of a border zone around the country's periphery, are a part
of the Bulgarian People's Army and are under the Ministry of National
Defense. The Construction Troops are labor forces, but the bulk of their
personnel comes from the annual military draft, and they are organized
into regular military units and are subject to military regulations and
discipline.

The rights of the individual citizen are defended in the 1971
Constitution and in the Criminal Code of 1968, which was not altered by
the constitution. The latter states that a crime can only be an act so
identified in the code and for which a punishment is prescribed. These
principles can and have been abused--the state is set above the
individual, and the judicial machinery is within an agency of the
executive branch of the government--but those who exercise the machinery
have become increasingly responsive to its guiding statutes. The limits
on punishments that are set down in the code allow somewhat greater
sentences to be handed down upon those committing crimes against the
state or state property than upon individuals or private property.

INTERNAL SECURITY

State and Internal Security Forces

During th