CEDH · CASELAW;CLIN;ENG — 17 février 2026

.s3ABFC313 { font-size:10pt } .sD4B5322E { margin-top:12pt; margin-bottom:12pt; text-align:justify } .sBB9EE52A { font-family:Arial } .sA241FE93 { margin-top:0pt; margin-bottom:18pt; text-align:justify; page-break-after:avoid; border-bottom:0.75pt solid #000000; padding-bottom:1pt } .s2EF62ED2 { margin-top:0pt; margin-bottom:0pt; font-size:12pt } .s4DDA3AA3 { font-family:Arial; font-weight:bold; font-style:italic } .s29100277 { font-family:Arial; font-weight:bold } .s32563E28 { margin-top:0pt; margin-bottom:0pt } .s8F2B0B1B { margin-top:12pt; margin-bottom:12pt; page-break-after:avoid; font-size:12pt } .s65B66A85 { margin-top:12pt; margin-bottom:12pt } .s97EB40D9 { margin-top:12pt; margin-bottom:14pt; page-break-after:avoid } .sA36B60A1 { font-family:Arial; font-style:italic } .s5F48796F { margin-top:12pt; margin-bottom:0pt; text-align:justify } .s7ED160F0 { text-decoration:none } .s3DC36BA9 { font-family:Arial; text-decoration:underline; color:#0069d6 } .s8B6C6D43 { margin-top:0pt; margin-bottom:0pt; border-bottom:1pt solid #000000; padding-bottom:1pt } .sDF790F1E { margin-top:12pt; margin-bottom:0pt; text-align:center } Legal summary February 2026 Green Alliance v. Bulgaria - 6580/22 Judgment 17.2.2026 [Section III] Article 8 Article 8-1 Respect for correspondence Respect for home Shortcomings in the legal framework permitting the infiltration of “agents on cover” into private organisations or “liberal professions”: violation Facts – Under regulations issued in 2008 and amended in 2018, Bulgaria’s State Agency for National Security (“the Agency”) could, on the decision of its head, infiltrate “agents on cover” into a private entity or as members of a “liberal profession”. Those “agents on cover” concealed only that they were working for the Agency, but were not permitted to use covert surveillance techniques or equipment, and were in Bulgaria considered as different from “agents under cover”. The applicant association sought judicial review of those regulations, arguing that in the absence of effective safeguards in relation to the use of such agents, they permitted abusive and disproportionate interferences with rights protected under Article   8 of the Convention. The administrative courts dismissed its claim. Law – Article   8: (1) Victim status and the existence of an interference with rights protected under Article   8 – The issue of whether the existence of the regulations in issue – which enabled the Agency to deploy “agents on cover” in private organisations – interfered with rights of the applicant association under Article   8 comprised two questions, the second contingent on the first being answered in the affirmative. (a) Could the work of an “agent on cover” interfere with the rights of the applicant association under Article   8? – Firstly, an “agent on cover” infiltrated into the association would undoubtedly be able to obtain data about the association’s “correspondence” within the meaning of Article   8 §   1. As construed in the Court’s case-law, that term covered all sorts of private communications, whatever their content or form – oral communications, letters, telephone conversations or electronic exchanges. In particular, it comprised calls made from, or received on, office telephones as well as work emails. It also covered the communications of legal persons. “Correspondence” could be interfered with not only at the time when it was being sent or received, but also subsequently, through accessing the medium – physical or electronic – where it had been stored. It was not far-fetched to surmise that (i)   a covert operative infiltrated into an organisation could use his or her position to obtain such access in a manner that would not be possible for an outsider, and that (ii)   such an operative, being an Agency officer, would report his or her findings to the Agency far more readily, and in a more sustained and systematic way, than a member of the public or a whistleblower driven by a sense of civic duty or even by statutory duty. Secondly, an “agent on cover” infiltrated into the association would also be likely to have long-term access to its office or other premises. According to the Court’s case-law, a legal person’s registered office, branches and other business premises could be considered as that legal person’s “home” within the meaning of Article   8 §   1. Accordingly, the infiltration of an “agent on cover” into the association would amount to interference with both with its rights to respect for its “correspondence” and its “home” within the meaning of Article   8 §   1. In view of that conclusion, the Court found that it would be superfluous to ascertain whether the use of such an agent with respect to the association would also amount to interference with its right to respect for its “private life”, if any. (b) Could the applicant association claim to be a victim of interference with those rights on account of the mere existence of the regulations on “agents on cover”? – (i) General principles – The case-law principles on when applicants could claim to be victims of interference with their Article   8 rights on account of the mere existence of domestic laws or practices permitting covert surveillance were equally relevant to situations such as the present one, where the secrecy of the surveillance in question was achieved not through fully disguising from the target that monitoring was under way (as happened for instance with the covert interception of communications or the use of covert surveillance equipment such as hidden cameras or recording devices), but through systematic arrangements calculated to conceal simply that the target’s otherwise overt interlocutor was in fact an operative systematically using or manipulating his or her position or relationships to obtain information for use by the authorities. In such situations, the persons targeted or affected by such surveillance remained similarly unaware of it. (ii) Application of those principles – The scope of the regulations was such that theoretically, any non-governmental organisation in Bulgaria could become the target of such intelligence and counterintelligence measures, and thus possibly be affected by the regulations. Furthermore, there was no effective remedy that could alleviate suspicions among the general public that the Agency’s capability to deploy “agents on cover” could be abused. In particular, the special remedy that had been put in place in 2009 for claiming damages for the unlawful use of “special means of surveillance” did not apply to “agents on cover”. The remaining remedies were also not effective: the data protection remedy under the State Agency for National Security Act 2007; complaining to the Commission for Protection of Personal Data; resorting to the other general data protection remedies under the Protection of Personal Data Act 2002; seeking judicial review of the decisions of the head of the Agency, and engaging the personal liability of “agents on cover”. Accordingly, the Court found that the mere existence of the regulations – which had since 2018 permitted the infiltration of “agents on cover” into private organisations – could be seen as interference with the applicant association’s rights under Article   8, without it being necessary to ascertain whether the association was at risk of having such agents infiltrated into it, owing to its specific situation. It was therefore justified to examine those regulations (along with any related laws and practices) in the abstract. Indeed, by pursuing to a conclusion its claim for judicial review of those regulations, the association had exhausted the available domestic remedies in respect of its complaint on that point. In view of the above, the Court dismissed the Government’s objections relating to the non-exhaustion of domestic remedies and the applicant association’s victim status, which had both been joined to the merits. (2) Justification for the interference – (a) General principles – With regard to the level of safeguards, the Court emphasised that the overarching requirement was that any covert surveillance system had to contain effective safeguards – especially review and supervision arrangements   – which could protect against the inherent risk of arbitrariness and abuse, and which could keep the interference that such a system entailed with the rights protected by Article   8 to what was “necessary in a democratic society”. The general principles concerning covert surveillance were equally relevant to situations such as the one at hand, where the secrecy of the surveillance was achieved through arrangements calculated to conceal that the target’s otherwise overt interlocutor was in effect an operative using or manipulating his or her position or relationships to obtain information for use by the authorities. The degree of intrusion resulting from the use of this surveillance technique was not necessarily any lesser in a given case than that entailed by the interception of communications – in particular since such operatives could likewise obtain access to the content of the target’s communications. According to the Court’s case-law, the decisive factor for assessing what level of safeguards was required in relation to a given surveillance technique was the degree of intrusion with the rights under Article   8 that it entailed rather than its technical definition. That said, the specific requirements flowing from those principles might need to be adjusted to account for the differences between the intrusion entailed by the use of an “agent on cover” and the degree of intrusion entailed by other covert surveillance techniques such as the interception of communications. With regard to the manner of examination of the safeguards, the Court observed that in cases such as the present one – in which the applicant complained in the abstract about a system that allowed covert surveillance rather than of specific instances of such surveillance – the relevant domestic laws had to be scrutinised as they stood when the Court examined the application and not when it had been lodged. Moreover, the assessment of whether the laws in issue offered effective safeguards against abuse had to be based not only on those laws as they were on paper, but also on the actual operation of the surveillance regime in issue, the existence or absence of evidence that it had been abused. (b) Application of those principles – The 2008 regulations governing the use of “agents on cover” and their 2018 amendments had been officially published and were therefore accessible. However, the Court found that they fell short of the minimum safeguards against arbitrariness and abuse required under Article   8 in the following respects: – The broadly-defined grounds on which “agents on cover” could be deployed and the fields in which they could be deployed, coupled with the way in which that deployment was decided, were capable of leading to arbitrariness and abuse. Theoretically, any individual or private organisation in Bulgaria could find him, her or itself under surveillance by such agents, a situation which constituted a significant interference into individual privacy rights, including a possible chilling effect on civic participation. It was not the breadth of the potential field of work of such agents that was problematic in itself, but rather the absence of any effective independent check on potential arbitrariness – There were no time-limits circumscribing the use of an “agent on cover”. Such agents could thus, theoretically, be deployed for indefinite periods – for as long as the Agency remained of the view that there was a “proven operative need” for their use. – The procedure for deploying such agents did not appear capable of ensuring that they would be used only when “necessary in a democratic society”. Although according to the regulations an “agent on cover” might be deployed if there was a “proven operational need”, and that such a need existed if the Agency’s statutory tasks could not be discharged in another way, they gave no indication of the factors that the head of the Agency must consider when assessing those points. There was therefore no guarantee that “agents on cover” would be deployed only when genuinely necessary and proportionate in each case. Nor was there an explicit requirement for the assessment of any such matters to be properly recorded by the Agency, so as to make it possible for the deployment of an “agent in cover” to be effectively scrutinised later. – No arrangements existed for effective supervision of the use or work of “agents on cover”, which could lead to arbitrariness and abuse, as well as to corruption or   the misuse of power by the “agents on cover” themselves. – Lastly, domestic law did not provide an effective remedy in relation to the unlawful or unjustified use of “agents on cover”. The Court also noted the absence of any domestic law provision for the notification of the use of an “agent on cover” and that it did not seem possible for persons possibly affected to obtain information about the use of such agents. Although those were not necessarily problematic in themselves (since the disclosure of the deployment of an “agent on cover” in a particular organisation would in many cases inevitably give clues about or even be effectively tantamount to disclosing the identity of that agent), it affected the possibilities for those persons to seek a remedy. Moreover, the Court observed that the regulations did not state anything about the storing, accessing, examining, using, communicating and destruction of data which had been obtained as a result of the use of “agents on cover”. While in the absence of any submissions by the parties on that point the Court was not prepared to delve into it further, it noted that, by contrast, relatively detailed provisions governed all those matters in relation to data obtained by using “special means of surveillance”   – and that, still, various lacunae in those provisions had led it to conclude that it was possible for such data to be misused for ends that had little to do with the statutory purpose for which they were collected. (c) Conclusio n – While there was no evidence that all the abovementioned shortcomings in the legal regime had had an actual impact on the use of “agents on cover” in Bulgaria, since that use was by definition clandestine and no information was available about it in the public domain, no decisive weight could be attached to that lack of evidence of arbitrariness or abuse. Moreover, the 2018 amendments made it possible for “agents on cover” to be infiltrated into private organisations and “liberal professions”. The Court thus found that domestic provisions on “agents on cover” did not meet the quality-of-law requirement and were incapable of keeping the interference with rights protected under Article   8 entailed by the use of such agents to what was “necessary in a democratic society”. Conclusion : violation (unanimously). Article   41: finding of violation sufficient in respect of non-pecuniary damage. (See Roman Zakharov v.   Russia [GC], 47143/06, 4   December 2015, Legal Summary ; Centrum för rättvisa v.   Sweden [GC], 35252/08, 25   May 2021, Legal Summary ; Big Brother Watch and Others v.   the United Kingdom [GC], 58170/13 et al, 25   May 2021, Legal Summary ; Ekimdzhiev and Others v.   Bulgaria , 70078/12, 11   January 2022, Legal Summary )   © Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court. To access legal summaries in English or French click here . For non-official translations into other languages click here .