Stuttgart (dpa/lsw) - The report by the top data protection officer on the disclosure of a lawyer's letter to the press by Interior Minister Thomas Strobl (CDU) does not surprise the German police union. If a police officer queries his grandmother in the police system, it costs him at least 1,000 euros, union boss Ralf Kusterer said on Tuesday. "The current incident weighs much more heavily. The police rightly have high data protection requirements." In the case of data protection violations, a fine of up to 20 million euros is possible.
A dismissal procedure solely because of an administrative offense is rare, but Strobl is dealing with a serious case, the union said. The criminal investigations are also still open. "The interior minister will probably make it into the data protection report 2022 of the state data protection officer. That should not have happened in Germany before," said von Kusterer.
According to a report by the data protection officer Stefan Brink, Strobl is said to have clearly violated the law by forwarding a letter from the lawyer of a high-ranking police officer to a journalist. The result is a data protection supervisory test procedure that the SPD Brink had requested.
At the heart of the affair are actually investigations into a leading police officer on suspicion of sexual harassment. The man is said to have harassed a chief inspector in a video chat. The German police union had already sharply criticized the behavior of the interior minister at the beginning of May. If Strobl were a police officer, the interior ministry would have suspended him, Kusterer said at the time.
