Tirana – Albania’s government published its decision to drop moves to enforce registration of the phone code on Thursday in the Official Gazette.

It comes on the heels of a lawsuit filed by the opposition centre-right Democratic Party in the Constitutional Court.

The opposition said granting government agencies access to online mobile communications tools such as Whatsupp, Viber, SMS and others, breached people’s rights to privacy and raised fears of illegal eavesdropping.

The International Mobile Station Identity, or IMEI, is number printed in the battery area of the mobile handset that GSM networks use to identify valid devices.

In some countries, the IMEI code is used to thwart mobile phone theft by blacklisting devices that are stolen.

The government’s earlier decision, adopted on July 4, obliged Albanians to register the IMEI of their mobile handsets or face fines or termination of their service by operators.

The government argued that the registration of the IMEI code was necessary for security reasons, to combat the use of cell phones in improvised explosive devices, for example. This method has featured in a number of assassinations lately./balkaninsight/