German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 19/207, pp. 26166-26167.
We once more occupy ourselves this week with the Federal Constitutional Court’s judgment of May 2020 and with your unfortunately condemned to failure draft law, this time with the effects on the Federal Intelligence Service [BND, Bundesnachrichten-dienst]. With all due respect for the Federal Constitutional Court and in awareness of the field of tension between data protection and security: Here, the BND was classically trimmed. The world shall heal on the German Basic Law – do you feel the frankly Wilhelmine aura of this law?
What since the Code of Hammurabi no jurist until this time has conceived shall now become valid law: Unlike any other law and any constitution in the world, ja, differing even from the European Convention on Human Rights itself, the charter of basic rights of the European Union in Article 56, which stops entirely at the sovereign territory of a state, shall our Basic Law be valid for the whole world. On German substance…
When an Isis executioner in Iraq receives from his commandant in Syria the order for the next 50 beheadings, he can be secure in the protection of his German basic rights.
André Hahn (Linke): Complete imbecility!
When German soldiers lie under Taliban fire, their transmission shall first be tested by a German control organization before it can be heard.
Konstantin von Notz (Greens): You have not read the judgment!
What comes next? Compensation claims of terrorists and serious criminals on account of violation of their personality rights,
Konstantin von Notz (Greens): Neither!
preferably in the U.S.A. on account of the horrendous sums that will there be adjudicated? A new form of development assistance.
André Hahn (Linke): You have not understood it!
We have the foreign journalists to thank, who come from countries with authentic human rights violations and who have selectively targeted Germany for their complaints. Here, where the security organizations will not be treated and abused with the most stepmotherly ways and means only if their activities are directed against opposition parties true to the constitution.
Benjamin Strasser (FDP): That is simply wrong!
The
consequences of these judgments and your draft laws are catastrophic. Foreign reconnaissance,
in so far as it concerns telecommunications, will effectively be impossible.
Konstantin von Notz (Greens): Such rubbish!
All intelligence, which must be gained only remotely and be of immediate interest, will be abducted by control bodies. Finally and quite decisively, international cooperation, in for example the fight against terrorism, will be made impossible. No secret service will share its intelligence with us; the “third party rule” is dead. And it will be very quickly noted in Germany that the secret services of other states need us much less than we need them.
Konstantin von Notz (Greens): You
have no idea! No idea at all!
As a partner then, the place of the state-of-law, morally solid BND will be taken by other services with distinctly fewer scruples, distinctly fewer red lines, and distinctly more corpses in the cellar.
Yet the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court is, ja, only one piece of the puzzle. Instead of taking the judgment as an occasion for the fundamental reform of the security authorities, as was demanded by the AfD at the removal of the duration limit of the terrorism law, – it was sufficient time and still is – comes again only patchwork. You build provision on provision on provision and make a new reform which alone as a bureaucracy monster, utterly impractical, hinders the work of the Intelligence Service – which was confirmed in the experts’ hearing on Monday.
In the 70s, a Danish politician proposed out of protest that the entire Danish military should be replaced by one answering machine, on which was to be heard, only in Russian: We surrender! In the same spirit, I recommend to you to replace the BND by means of a file binder, in which on one page only is: We know nothing. It would be the same result as your draft law here; yet we would at least save money.
Hearty thanks. A pleasant weekend, and feel yourselves secure!
Thomas Hitschler (SPD): I have an idea how money could be saved!
[trans: tem]
