It is often said that "things in Bulgaria are not what they seem". And after we saw the previous Socialist-led government introduce a right-wing agenda of flat-rate income taxes, who could be truly surprised at a centre-right government introducing electronic eavesdropping legislation that would make any Communist-era secret service agent wake up utterly aroused?

On the same day that Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borissov admitted, at an AmCham business luncheon, that high-level organised crime groups in Bulgaria had been able to count on help from Interior Ministry insiders, Borissov’s right-hand man and Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov needed only the support of ultra-nationalists Ataka to push through Parliament legislation of a kind that the Socialists had tried and failed five times to get approved.

Knowing that the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) had tried so hard to get similar proposals approved, and so would hardly be in a position to put up a fight, Tsvetanov and his Interior Ministry top officials obviously felt they could go for broke. So they took the Socialist proposals, slapped on real-time access to electronic communication data, and, at what can only be considered break-neck speed by Bulgarian standards, whipped the legislation through the stages towards approval.

Tsvetanov even borrowed his Socialist predecessors’ arguments as to why the Interior Ministry needed to have real-time access to mobile phone communication. Tsvetanov, like his two Socialist predecessors Mihail Mikov and Roumen Petkov, failed to explain why access to online communication was needed. All three obviously counted on Parliament overlooking this little detail.

Several public hearings in autumn 2009 led only to minor changes to the proposed amendments, not addressing any of the major concerns, which included that the amendments could be unconstitutional.

When the amendments were discussed in Parliament, it was the Blue Coalition’s Ivan Kostov who said that the legislation might not survive a challenge in the Constitutional Court.
A fate that it would share with the first attempt to introduce similar legislation; the now infamous Ordinance 40, issued by then-interior minister Petkov.

The Constitutional Court rejected the ordinance, saying that it violated fundamental constitutional rights. As it happened, Petkov had a political lifespan even shorter than that of his ordinance, when he was forced to resign – even though then-prime minister Sergei Stanishev could not bring himself to concede publicly that there was something wrong with an interior minister being seen having coffee with known top criminals.

While Parliament went on winter recess, privacy advocates and non-governmental organisations were preparing to take on the amendments when they reached second reading stage early in the New Year.
To be continued.

Biometrics in slow motion
Although Bulgaria was to have introduced passports containing biometric data when it joined the European Union in January 2007, the dawn of 2010 found Bulgaria still issuing old-fashioned passports without biometric data.

After several years of legal to-and-fros over the procurement for the production of the new passports, it was then-interior minister Mikov who, in June 2009, just weeks before leaving office, proudly presented the methods for applying for and producing the country’s new ID documents.

According to Mikov, Bulgaria would be ready to issue passports with biometric data well before the end of 2009, but, as a safety measure, the start date for official issuing of the documents had been set for 2010.

At the presentation, Mikov said that all personal data related to the passports would be stored in a centralised database. When asked by The Sofia Echo who would have access to this database and under what conditions, Mikov replied – with a mixture of slight irritation and surprise at the question – that, of course, that would be Interior Ministry staff, though he could not say who within the ministry would have such access or under what conditions.

A few months later, incoming Deputy Interior Minister Veselin Vuchkov announced that the introduction would be pushed back by another quarter, citing ongoing legal wrangling in the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) about the selection of Germany’s Siemens to produce the passports.

As if legal worries were not enough to postpone the introduction of the passports, Vuchkov said that changes to the Identity Documents Act were needed to resolve certain issues, including how to administratively handle gender changes as the gender was encoded in the social security number or EGN.
By the end of 2009, however, there had been only three registered cases of gender changes in the country.