For years, critics have complained that federal states are tightening their police laws. Karlsruhe is now objecting to a number of regulations in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania - and making strict specifications. Minister of the Interior, however, does not only see the north-east affected.
Karlsruhe/Schwerin (dpa/mv) - The Federal Constitutional Court protects citizens from excessively generous investigative powers of the police. The judges declared a number of provisions in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania's Security and Order Act (SOG), which was reformed in 2020, to be unconstitutional, as they announced on Wednesday. The Society for Freedom Rights (GFF), which helped initiate the proceedings in Karlsruhe, spoke of a fundamental decision that also sets constitutional limits to the tightening of police laws in other federal states.
In the opinion of MV Interior Minister Christian level (SPD), the Karlsruhe judgment has meaning beyond the Northeast. In other federal states there are similar regulations as in MV, said the level on Wednesday in Schwerin. The minister announced that he would submit a draft amendment to the security and regulatory law to the state parliament by the end of the year. The specifications from Karlsruhe would be implemented "one to one", he assured.
The Deputy State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Rolf Hellwig, offered help with the necessary changes. According to Hellwig, the authority had already criticized legislative procedures.
Some of the regulations were directly declared void by the Federal Constitutional Court. Other regulations remain in force with restrictions. Here it is not the powers themselves that are unconstitutional, but only the design, according to Karlsruhe.
A central point in the almost 100-page decision is the protection of the so-called core area of private life when informants and undercover investigators are used. Accordingly, "the state-induced entering into an intimate relationship for the purpose of obtaining information" is excluded. Also, no one may be recruited as an informant to spy on their own spouse.
If private information is discussed during the operation, the undercover investigator or informant must back down, according to the court, as long as he or she does not put himself or herself in serious danger - i.e. "for life or limb". If sensitive information is obtained, it must not be passed on. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, these points are not guaranteed.
Other complaints relate to longer-term observations, spying on and listening to homes, online searches and the monitoring of telecommunications, for example via mobile phones. The point here is that the measure is allowed at a too early stage. According to the Karlsruhe decision, a specific or even urgent danger is usually required.
GFF procedure coordinator David Werdermann announced that the police must also respect fundamental rights when it comes to defending against serious crimes. "The tightening of police law in various federal states, which allows surveillance well in advance of a danger, violates the Basic Law."
In Karlsruhe, the GFF sued against police laws in various countries. According to them, there are regulations in Bavaria and Saxony in particular that, like in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, allow surveillance well in advance of a specific danger.
For the constitutional complaint about Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the GFF had joined forces with the alliance "SONamenste Sicherheit". Among the complainants were a climate activist, a criminal defense lawyer, a journalist specializing in extremism and migration, and two people with contacts in the football fan scene. (Az. 1 BvR 1345/21)
For the opposition, the verdict from Karlsruhe was foreseeable. The domestic spokeswoman for the Greens in the state parliament, Constanze Oehlrich, said: "The SOG amendment was a failure with an announcement." In expert hearings in the state parliament before the law was passed, it was pointed out that the draft violated fundamental rights guaranteed in the constitution. "But the then red-black state government wiped these concerns off the table."
The FDP parliamentary group leader René Domke called for the establishment of an independent commission to evaluate the SOG and the development of a "monitoring accounting". He announced an application for the state parliament session in March. In recent years, there has been a tendency to restrict citizens' liberties more and more and only revise them after court decisions.
The domestic politician of the left, which has been in government since autumn 2022, Michael Noetzel, described it as "extremely questionable to introduce laws that deliberately overshoot the mark in order to allow the courts to explore the constitutional limits". Ann Christin von Allwörden from the CDU parliamentary group demanded that the police still need "modern investigation options" after the Karlsruhe verdict. The SOG took on its present form under the then Minister of the Interior, Lorenz Caffier (CDU).
