EU rights court slams lack of oversight for Bulgarian shadow agents

(CN) — Bulgaria cannot quietly slip secret agents into private organizations and wave it off as national security, Europe’s human rights court said Tuesday, finding the country’s rules give intelligence officials too much discretion and ordinary citizens too little protection.

The case, brought by environmental NGO Green Alliance, zeroed in on a peculiarly named tool in Bulgarian law: “Agents on cover,” operatives who embed in private entities while hiding their ties to the state.

Strip away the legal jargon: Who watches the watchers?

The judges said the problem was not the use of covert officers but the weak guardrails around them. The court accepted that governments can use undercover tactics to protect national security. But those powers have to be tightly framed, independently supervised and open to real challenge if misused.

In Bulgaria’s setup, the judges found, the safeguards looked stronger on paper than in reality — and that gap was enough to breach the right to private life.

Under Bulgarian law, the State Agency for National Security, known locally as DANS, can deploy two kinds of covert operatives. Classic “undercover agents” are allowed to use technical surveillance tools. “Agents on cover,” meanwhile, are not supposed to tap phones or plant listening devices, but they can hide their true identity and take positions inside companies, nonprofits or liberal professions, blending into everyday life without disclosing who they really work for.

Green Alliance says the distinction between the two was little more than “mere wordplay.” Even without formal surveillance powers, agents on cover could still access internal information from the inside, the group argues, without meaningful independent oversight.

The Bulgarian government insisted the system has guardrails. An agent on cover can be deployed only after officials justify an “operative need,” and courts remain available to hear complaints. In Sofia’s view, that mix of internal approval and judicial oversight is enough to prevent abuse.

The Strasbourg judges were not convinced. They saw actual oversight that mostly stayed within the system itself, moving along the same internal chain of command, with only limited ways for people to challenge covert measures.

That kind of closed-loop supervision, the court said, is not enough when the state is operating in secret. “There is therefore no guarantee that ‘agents on cover’ would be deployed only when genuinely necessary and proportionate in each case,” the judges wrote.

Adela Katchaounova, co-chair and Legal Defense Program Director at the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, said the ruling brings long-simmering concerns about Bulgaria’s intelligence framework into the open. When the same agency both authorizes and carries out covert operations, she said, real safeguards become hard to guarantee.

She described the judgment as a meaningful step forward and said it should prompt a rethink of how human intelligence work is regulated. But she cautioned court rulings alone do not rewrite systems. Without political will, she warned, reform can easily stall, as it has in previous surveillance cases.

For years, Bulgaria has sat at the bottom of the European Union table in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, the annual global ranking that measures perceived levels of public-sector corruption. In the 2025 edition, it again finished last among EU countries, trailing well behind the bloc’s average and most of its regional neighbors.

That gap shows up in public mood as well. National surveys in recent years have recordedstrikingly low trust in Parliament and other core institutions, with far more respondents expressing distrust than confidence.

In that climate, the covert agent system has repeatedly come under fire from civil society groups and investigative reporters who describe the agency as opaque and politically entangled, fueling broader worries about whether oversight works when powerful security bodies are involved.

Radosveta Vassileva, an adjunct senior research fellow in EU law at University College Dublin’s Sutherland School of Law, said the bigger picture cannot be ignored.

“Bulgaria, sadly, is a captured state — public institutions, in practice, serve private interests rather than the public interest,” she said, adding that DANS operates “like a black box and is notoriously nontransparent.” She also noted that the Supreme Administrative Court, which rejected the NGO’s case domestically, “has a long track record of violating the ECHR.”

Even so, “the judgment should be seen in a positive light because it condemns DANS’ abusive practices,” she wrote, while cautioning that legal loopholes and political realities could limit how much changes on the ground.

The ruling is not yet the last word. The parties have three months to seek a referral to the Grand Chamber, a rare step reserved for exceptional cases. If no referral is requested, or if it is turned down, the judgment will become final and legally binding.

From there, the focus shifts to compliance. Bulgaria would be expected to fix the gaps the court identified, usually through changes to its laws or procedures, under the watch of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers, which monitors how states carry out human rights judgments.

Bulgaria’s Ministry of Justice and representatives of Green Alliance did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Courthouse News reporter Eunseo Hong is based in the Netherlands.