Court tells Berlin to reveal surveillance of deputies

Jul 30, 2009, 15:32 GMT

   Karlsruhe, Germany - Berlin and its intelligence agencies suffered a fresh legal setback Thursday with a court ruling that they must reveal any surveillance of parliamentarians.

Opposition parties won their case at the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe after the government refused to answer a question in parliament in 2006 about whether anti-spy agencies monitored deputies.

Berlin said at the time it could not answer because this would compromise intelligence-gathering methods. But the judges ruled this explanation was not convincing.

Last week, in a similar case, the court ruled that information could not be withheld from a secret parliamentary oversight committee on the mere grounds the data were 'classified.'

Judges said this week that parliament had a right to answers on the surveillance issue, which blew up after news reports that Sweden had put some of its members of parliament under watch by anti-subversion agencies.

The case was brought by the Greens party and four other deputies.

In the same year, the Left Party had asked if it was under surveillance and the government replied that information on the Left was being collected, but only from the media and other published sources.