Germany: Deployment of armed forces for World Cup?
01 January 2006
The football World Cup in Germany has raised some serious questions of concern. August Henning, president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Foreign Intelligence Service) from 1998 to December 2005 and currently State Secretary of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, has argued that parliamentary control of the intelligence agencies would "paralyse" the services because they have to prepare for the World Cup. Law enforcement authorities are currently working on biometric identification systems, RFID chips in tickets and cross-border police cooperation involving personal database conflations, all with limited public scrutiny and in the name of security against the threat to football (see Statewatch Vol 15. nos 3/4). Alongside these internal control mechanisms, conservative interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble (Christlich Demokratische Union - CDU) has been pushing for a change in the German constitution (Grundgesetz) to allow for the deployment of the armed forces inland. It is an absolute necessity for the World Cup, he argues, because the police cannot cope with the enormity of the task.
Article 35.2 sentence 2 and 35.3 sentence 1 of the constitution regulates the employment of the armed forces for the control of natural disasters or in the case of especially grave accidents. It does not permit the Federation of German States to order armed missions. However, the CDU is now using a Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht - BVerfG) decision from 15 February this year, which ruled the 2004 Aviation Security Act unconstitutional (as it gave powers to the army to shoot down hijacked airplanes, see Statewatch Vol. 14 nos 3/4) to argue for a change in the constitution to allow army deployment inland. To effect a change in the constitution the government needs a two thirds majority in the Lower and Upper Houses of Parliament. As a state secretary of the CDU was quoted as saying while awaiting the court's decision, if the BVerfG rules against the Aviation Security Act: "then we get the instruction for making the necessary change to the constitution presented on a silver plate".
This logic has so far not convinced the CDU's SPD coalition partners, as the BVerfG decision is rather concerned with the protection of the basic right to life (Article 2.2) and the protection of the inviolability of human dignity (Article 1.1), both of which cannot be violated even with a parliamentary majority, as is laid down in Article 79 of the Constitution. The court's ruling reads as follows:
The passengers and crew members who are exposed to such a mission are in a desperate situation. They can no longer influence the circumstances of their lives independently from others in a self-determined manner. This makes them objects not only of the perpetrators of the crime. Also the state which in such a situation resorts to the measure provided by '14.3 of the Aviation Security Act treats them as mere objects of its rescue operation for the protection of others. Such a treatment ignores the status of the persons affected as subjects endowed with dignity and inalienable rights. By their killing being used as a means to save others, they are treated as objects and at the same time deprived of their rights; with their lives being disposed of unilaterally by the state, the persons on board the aircraft, who, as victims, are themselves in need of protection, are denied the value which is due to a human being for his or her own sake
Further,
Under the applicability of Article 1.1 of the Basic Law (guarantee of human dignity) it is absolutely inconceivable to intentionally kill persons who are in such a helpless situation on the basis of a statutory authorisation. [...]
The opinion, which has been advanced on some occasions, that the persons who are held on board have become part of a weapon and must bear being treated as such, expresses in a virtually undisguised manner that the victims of such an incident are no longe