Wed, Feb 08 2012

Court limits Interior Ministry's access to personal data

Thu, Dec 11 2008 18:00 CET

byPetar Kostadinov

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Court limits Interior Ministry's access to personal data

The Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) scrapped an article of a controversial Interior Ministry ordinance that would have effectively given law enforcement bodies unlimited access to personal communications of citizens, the SAC press office said on December 11 2008.

The article in question is article 5 of Ordinance 40, issued by now-former interior minister Roumen Petkov on January 7 2008, which implements the European Union Data Retention Directive.

Article 5 envisages that entities that provide public electronic services andor maintain public electronic information networks would provide police with access to their data whenever this access meets the Interior Ministry's needs when conducting investigations.

The SAC ruled this definition as too vague, as it did not provide any kind of control over the ministry's access to citizens' personal information and did not answer to Bulgarian constitutional principles of protection of personal information of people.

This complaint was filed by the NGO Access to Information Programme (API).

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