In July and August 2011, a public debate was held in the media about the transparency of political parties’ financing from the state budget.
In the Political Parties Act, there is a provision stipulating that the state attributes subsidies to the parliamentary represented parties on the basis of their seats in the Parliament. The sum attributed to each Member of Parliament (MP) is defined by order of the Minister of Finance and amounts to 200,000 BGN annually. During the summer of 2011, there were 17 independent MPs and logically emerged the question to which parties those independent MPs sent their attributed subsidy. In practice, the MPs can attribute their subsidy to a certain parliamentary group by only declaring belonging and not necessarily joining it.
That is why three different media journalists – one TV (Victoria Petrova from bTV), another from a radio station (Ilia Valkov from Darik Radio) and the third from a print media (Pavlina Zhivkova from Banker weekly) filed similar requests for access to information to the Ministry of Finance. They demanded copies of the MPs declarations by which they had declared to which parties their subsidy should be attributed. The ground for the journalists’ requests was the public interest in knowing the political party preferences of each of the independent MPs.
The Ministry of Finance rejected access to the three requests on the ground of personal data protection. With the help of Access to Information Programme (AIP), the three denials were challenged in court. The court has decided on two of the cases judging in favor of the journalists, stating that the requested information did not constitute personal data. In the meanwhile, the National Assembly assigned to the National Audit Office to find out if the allocation, receiving, and spending of state subsidy to the parties to which the independent MPs had declared belonging was lawful.
The third court decision was delivered in September 2012, months after the first two. In its judgment, the court found that the political preferences of the independent members of parliament are sensitive personal data and repealed the appeal against the refusal of the Ministry of Finance.
The court decision is contradictory to the established case law and may create ground for an appeal of the previous two favorable decisions. Moreover, the number of independent MPs in the Bulgarian Parliament has raised and this last court decision stops the way for knowing the attribution of their state subsidies.
For its absurdity and the potential to create negative practices with regard to the access to information, the court decision was nominated for an anti-award at the 2012 Right to Know Day Awards by a member of the jury. The event organized and held by AIP is very popular. The media outreach results in dozens of publications in local and central media. Thus, the court decision found wide media coverage: www.righttoknowday.net.