About 10,000 phone interceptions were performed in the course of 2018, while another 3,300 this year so far. Most of these acts were initiated by the Ministry of the Interior. In a news conference after the meeting of the Supreme Security Council, President Igor Dodon said he will receive information about the number of tapped phones in a week.

According to him, not only politicians or journalists were subject to wiretapping. “I want to see yearly statistics because, as some of our colleagues from the Supreme Security Council say, the number of such acts increases when the election campaign starts,” noted Igor Dodon.

He also said that legal action was taken against four employees of the Ministry of the Interior, three prosecutors and four judges as these allowed tapping the phones of Moldovan citizens without having legal reasons, violating thus the procedures.

President Dodon said each citizen should know that they can ask for information to see if their phones were tapped from the Prosecutor General’s Office. Moreover, the investigation bodies are obliged, if they wiretapped, to inform the involved person about this in written form when the procedure is over.

In the meeting of the Supreme Security Council, President Dodon asked for information about wiretapping during the last five years. He said that 15,000 cases over wiretapping reached court last year, with 10,000 interceptions being recorded. The abusive character is evident as one interception per almost each case was impossible. In the future, the Council will analyze wiretapping once in three months.