The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Tuesday held Bulgaria’s laws on secret surveillance, including retention and accessing of communications data, violate the right to respect for private life and correspondence under Article 8 of the European Human Rights Convention.

The application was lodged in October 2012 by two Bulgarian lawyers, Mihail Tiholov Ekimdzhiev and Aleksandar Emilov Kashamov, and two NGOs, the Association for European integration and Human Rights and the Access to Information Foundation. They asserted that they were at risk of state surveillance owing to the nature of their activities and that the Bulgarian laws did not provide sufficient safeguards and remedies against arbitrary or abusive secret surveillance and accessing of communications data.

The court found that although covert surveillance is legal in Bulgaria under the Special Surveillance Means Act 1997 and Articles 172 to 176 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, there was a lack of proper judicial oversight over decisions to issue warrants for surveillance and a lack of clear regulation over the storage, access and destruction of secret surveillance data. This allowed secret surveillance data to be used for nefarious purposes.

It also found that independence of the body responsible for regulatory oversight, i.e. National Bureau for Control of Special Means of Surveillance, could not be guaranteed as its members were appointed after being vetted by the same agency whose requests they were meant to oversee.

Further, responses to people’s requests about whether they had been subject to surveillance appeared inadequate, since they did not clearly state whether there had been no surveillance at all, rather than just no illegal surveillance.

Regarding the process for accessing data, the court noted that the authorities’ requests did not have to provide supporting material and the decisions did not have to be reasoned. Thus, the laws did not “effectively guarantee that access was granted only when genuinely necessary and proportionate in each case.”

Bulgaria must now amend its domestic law to end the human rights violations and ensure compatibility with the European Human Rights Convention.