Scientology in Germany - Government Surveillance

Government Surveillance

Given the history of Nazism's rise to power in Germany in the 1930s, the present German state has committed itself to taking active steps to prevent the rise of any ideology that threatens the values enshrined in the German constitution. The BfV domestic intelligence service (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) regards the aims of Scientology as running counter to Germany's free and democratic order, and has been monitoring Scientology since 1997, as have the Offices for the Protection of the Constitution in a number of German Länder. Minister for Family Policy Claudia Nolte instituted the surveillance, saying that the church had totalitarian tendencies and that she would oppose Scientology with all the means at her disposal.

The German Church of Scientology has repeatedly challenged the legality of this surveillance in court. In December 2001, the Administrative Court in Berlin ruled against the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution and ordered it to stop the recruitment and deployment of staff and members of the Church of Scientology Berlin as paid informants. The court ruled that the use of informants was disproportionate. In 2003, the same court ruled that it was illegal for the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution to include the activities of Scientology in its report, given that the report did not document any activities that were opposed to the constitution.

At the federal level, Scientology lost a complaint against continued surveillance by the BfV in November 2004. The federal court based its opinion on its judgment that the aims of Scientology, as outlined by L. Ron Hubbard in his writings, were incompatible with the German constitution. Lawyers acting for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution pointed out that Hubbard had written that civil rights, for example, should be restricted to Scientologists, and they asserted that the Scientology organization was taking systematic steps to infiltrate society and government institutions in order to prevent anti-Scientology legislation. Opposing counsel acting for the Church of Scientology had contended that Scientology was non-political, its aims were the liberation of the human being, and that Hubbard's instructions were valid only within the Church of Scientology and were subject to interpretation, and at any rate there was no effort to implement these instructions in Germany. The court disagreed and ruled that many sources, some of them not accessible to the general public, indicated that the aims of the Church of Scientology did include the abrogation of the principle of equality and other essential human rights.

In Saarland, surveillance was stopped by a court as inappropriate in 2005, because there is no local branch of Scientology and few members. As of 6 May 2008, the Church of Scientology in Germany dropped the legal battle to prevent surveillance of its activities by the BfV after the North Rhine-Westphalia Higher Administrative Court in Münster refused to hear an appeal on the matter. Being suspected of maintaining "ambitions against the free, democratic basic order", the Scientology organization added a declaration on human rights and democracy to its bylaws.

There is at least one example of surveillance of Scientology by the German intelligence services outside of Germany. In 1998, the Swiss government detained an agent of the German government, charging him with "carrying out illegal business for a foreign state, working for a political information service and falsifying identity documents". The German government posted bail for the agent. He was eventually given a 30-day suspended jail sentence for spying on Scientology, and the German government apologized to Switzerland for the incident.