Bulgaria's biometric passport scheme

contesting in the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) the selection of Siemens. The companies were Bundesdruckerei, Allami Nuomda Nur, and Sagem. The price of the whole operation of issuing the new passports was set at €140 million, of which €116 million would go to Siemens, but as of January 2011. The complaint was the first obstacle that biometric passports had to overcome as the court suspended the procedure, which meant that Bulgaria risked being fined by the EC. As an EU border country, Bulgaria has specific obligations as a front-line border checkpoint to non-EU nationals entering the EU, and biometric passports are designed to help this process.

In June 2009, based on additional information provided by the Bulgarian Interior Ministry (information which was described as classified) the court rejected the complaint and the procedure for issuing the new passports was allowed to proceed.

Nothing is final

A few days after the court rejected the complaint, and just weeks before national elections, the then interior minister Mihail Mikov announced that the country would start issuing the documents “no later than January 2010.”

At the time, Mikov said he expected the ministry would be ready by October 2009, but issuing would not start until January to allow any last-minute problems to be resolved. This was when the media started speculating that something about the way the system was being implemented was not right.

As part of the process, hundreds of Interior Ministry employees had to be trained to work with the new system, which also meant that all devices had to be delivered and installed in time so that the system could be tested.

After the elections that brought Boiko Borissov’s party GERB to power, there were further signs that things were not going according to plan, although the new Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov made biometric passports one of his priorities. In September, Deputy Interior Minister Vesselin Vuchkov told Parliament that Bulgaria would be ready to start issuing new ID documents not by January, but by March 2010.

The passports of about 300 000 Bulgarians, however, were expiring in 2010 and needed replacement. This meant that new passports had to be issued as soon as possible or these people risked being stuck without ID documents for some time. To address the issue and avoid embarrassment, the ruling party put through a change to the law that prolonged the validity of the old documents by six months. The ministry