JUSTICE MINISTER RESIGNS IN PROTEST AGAINST BUGGING
For years, a political dispute over the introduction of the right for prosecution authorities to place bugging and other surveillance equipments inside private homes has opposed law and order enthusiasts and "liberals". Debate was particularly heated within the FDP, the Liberal Party, traditionally committed to civil liberties. This internal conflict has now resulted in the resignation of Ms Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger (FDP) from her post as a Federal Minister of Justice.
Since 1992, the use of what Germans have nick-named "Kleiner Lauschangriff" ("minor eavesdropping-attack") is permitted in investigations pertaining to certain forms of serious crime. "Minor bugging" implies the right for the police to make use of secret video and audio surveillance and recording outside private apartments. Ever since its introduction, police and security circles have been calling for a more extensive use of modern surveillance techniques even inside private apartments, by the legalisation of the so-called "Grosser Lauschangriff" ("major eavesdropping-attack").
These demands drew immediate support from Chancellor Helmut Kohl's conservative Christian-Democrats (CDU), who won the last parliamentary elections in autumn 1994 on a "tough on crime" campaign. But a broad "liberal" front comprising renowned jurists, the Greens, a minority of Social-Democrats and some of the FDP's senior politicians, including Justice Minister Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, vehemently opposed "major bugging", on the grounds that the sweeping use of eavesdropping, rather than being an effective weapon in combating crime, threatens to affect a lot of perfectly innocent people and put an end to the constitutional right to privacy "even in your own bedroom".
The FDP is the junior coalition partner in Kohl's Federal Government. This is why the Christian Democrats time and again were forced to postpone the planned introduction of "major bugging", so as not to put the coalition at risk. At the same time, the Christian Democrats and their Interior Minister, Manfred Kanther, missed no occasion for blaming the FDP of obstructing the Government's fight against crime. After a series of election setbacks for the FDP, this party's own hardliner faction insisted that FDP members be consulted by internal referendum on the issue. Confronted with the clear victory of the hardliners, Justice Minister Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger resigned in protest. She was followed by another prominent FDP-member, the leader of the party's left wing and former Justice Minister, Burkhard Hirsch. Mr Hirsch, a jurist of international renown, resigned as the Home Affairs speaker of the FDP's parliamentary group and as a member of the Federal Parliament's Home Affairs Committee. Both said that the FDP's turn-about indicated a dramatic change of orientation of the party's justice and home affairs policies, and Ms Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger expressly announced that she would fight against the "Haiderisation" of the party (a reference to Jörg Haider, the far-right leader of the Austrian sister party of the FDP).
Sources: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 15.12.95; our sources; see also FECL No.20: "Security Package 94..."; [No.28: "New law on 'fight against against crime': intelligence service to cooperate with police"](/artikel/2801/).