Information newsletter
Issue 04(28), April 2006

From the Court Room: The Director of the National Intelligence Services Was Sued with the Legal Assistance of AIP

A panel of the Supreme Administrative Court (SCC) obligated the Director of the National Intelligence Services (NIS), Gen. Kircho Kirov, to provide unrestricted access to materials from the archive of the former First Bureau of the State Security Services (FB of the SSS).

The litigation against the NIS was started by the journalist Hristo Hristov from Dnevnik daily newspaper at the end of 2004. At the time, Gen. Kircho Kirov did not respond to an access to information request submitted by the journalist. Hristov had demanded access to information about the activities of the special security services of the former People's Republic of Bulgaria in the period 1971-1979. He had asked for the information in relation to the research he was doing for his documentary book about the murder of the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov in London, 1978.

According to the journalist, the requested archive materials were key documents for the „neutralization“ of the writer and the collaboration between the SSS and the KGB during fulfilment of the task.

The attorneys of the NIS contested the complaint against the refusal with the statement that the Director of the NIS was not obliged to provide information under the provisions of the Access to Public Information Act (APIA) since the security services were not listed as obligee in the purview of the law itself. Furthermore, they argued that the requested information was classified as state secret and access to these documents was restricted.

The APIA and the court oversight it guaranteed over problematic issues of access to information have proved to be a powerful weapon in the hands of the civil society. The APIA proved to have a key role in holding government officials responsible for their inaction, as well as in compelling them to fulfil the duties they had under the law.

With the decision as of March 2006, the court panel repealed the silent refusal of the Director of the NIS and obligated him to provide access to the requested information about the case of Georgi Markov. The justices concluded that the NIS may not be excluded from the list of the obliged under the APIA bodies only because it a „security“ agency.

Besides, the court panel found out that the Director of the NIS had not fulfilled his duties under the Protection of Classified Information Act, adopted in 2002. He was obliged to declassify all information whose legal period of classification had expired and should have submitted the documents to the National Archive.

Thus, symbolically, the last bastion of totalitarian power has fallen—the unaccountability of the security services before the society. We now have to wait to see whether the Director will comply with the court decision or if he will avail himself of the opportunity to appeal it before the Supreme Administrative Court. Here, we have to say that when Hristov's book Kill the Tramp, dedicated to the case of „Georgi Markov,“ was published in June 2005, Gen. Kirov made a statement before the Associated Press that the materials would be declassified till the end of the year. This statement never came true.