SOFIA - The Bulgarian parliament decided in principle Tuesday to open up the files of the Communist-era secret services, resuming a process halted in 2002.
Details will be made public when a law is passed in about a month's time based on various proposals from political parties.
But it is already known that the names of agents and informers in the civil and military intelligence and counter-intelligence services at present working in senior posts in politics, the civil service, the media, the judiciary and higher education will be made public.
A 1997 law allowed publication of the names of 150 agents and their collaborators in the Communist secret services.
But the constitutional court ruled that names featuring in files whose archives had been destroyed in the interim should not be made public as they might have been the subject of manipulation.
The archives relating to 46 percent of collaborators, 30 percent of people under surveillance and 91 percent of people letting their premises be used for police purposes were destroyed in January 1990 after the dictator Todor Zhivkov was deposed.
A 2002 law on declassifying files, adopted ahead of NATO membership in 2004, said archives could not be opened until 2006.
08/29/2006 19:24 GMT