Less than a week after Parliament accepted amendments to the Law on Electronic Communication, Bulgarian daily Dnevnik said that the Interior Ministry was preparing new amendments that would amend the amendments and regain access to electronic communication data without prior permission from the court.

"We shall urge Parliament to approve the new texts, because our hands are now completely tied and we can not investigate," Interior Minister Mihail Mikov was quoted as saying by Dnevnik.

Waiting for a judge's decision was "one of our biggest problems," Mikov told Dnevnik. "We have to wait five to 10 days for authorisation to obtain print-outs and will not be able to work on fresh leads," Mikov said.

Head of the parliamentary committee on internal security Mincho Spassov rubbished Mikov's statement, saying police could always demand access to printouts immediately, the prosecutor would then have 24 hours to file for permission with the court.

District courts told Dnevnik that police requests for access to communication data are processed the same day, not five to 10 days later, as Mikov said.

Alexander Kashumov, legal counsel with the Access to Information Programme, said that the "Interior Ministry so far used the lack of clarity in the law on how access to communication data was arranged, and would refer only to the Law on the Interior Ministry."

"This bypassed the Penal Procedure Code, which requires access to computer data to be approved by a judge," Kashumov said.

With the amendments to the Law on Electronic Communication, it became "extremely clear that electronic communication data can only be made available to the ministry after approval by a judge," Kashumov said.

Spassov said there was no other European Union member state where police had access to communication data without permission from a judge.

According to Spassov, the Interior Ministry filed an average of 40 000 requests for print-outs of phone calls a year.

"Their power as evidence is disproportionate to the damage to constitutional rights of citizens, especially because print-outs cannot be entered as evidence in court," Spasov said.

At a meeting of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) parliamentary group on the evening of February 23, Mikov was said to have sharply criticized his fellow party-members for not defending the current practise of obtaining access to communication data.

Unnamed participants in the meeting were quoted by Dnevnik as saying that BSP members committed to supporting amendments requested by the Interior Ministry. A rapid adoption of the amendments would depend only on the will of the party's members of parliament, Dnevnik said.

The new amendments are expected to be tabled after amendments accepted in February 19 are published in the State Gazette, Dnevnik said.