President Plevneliev pledges to veto backtrack on Dossier Commission exposure of State Security agents
Bulgarian President Rossen Plevneliev has said that if Parliament approves proposed legislative amendments that would prevent the Dossier Commission disclosing former communist-era State Security agents in post-1991 civilian and military intelligence services, he will veto them.
In 2012, Parliament amended the law on the Dossier Commission – the body charged by statute with identifying people in certain categories of public life who were agents or collaborators with State Security or the intelligence division of the Bulgarian People’s Army – to enable the naming of communist-era secret service people who were part of post-communist intelligence services.
It has emerged that the three parties that since the May 2013 parliamentary elections together can muster a majority in Parliament – the Bulgarian Socialist Party, Movement for Rights and Freedoms and Volen Siderov’s ultra-nationalists Ataka – have pushed through the first committee stage amendments that would reverse this part of the law.
Speaking to public broadcaster Bulgarian National Television on October 4, Plevneliev said that he had made clear commitments during his 2011 presidential election campaign regarding State Security.
“I have said many times, and I will repeat again, State Security must go to the museum; we must finish the story with the semi-declassified secret files and with the dependencies on the past,” Plevneliev said.
Many people believed that there were those who were living and thriving on the basis of these networks of the past, he said.
Plevneliev said that an option was to protect people currently serving abroad from disclosure.
In 2012, when the amendments were approved at the initiative of the right-wing Blue Coalition and with the support of then-governing centre-right party GERB, the BSP and its allies claimed that disclosures about top intelligence officials would put lives at risk.
