BVerwG 6 A 9.14, Judgment of 14 Dezember 2016 | Bundesverwaltungsgericht

30.07.20, 16:19

The claimant refers to the Parliamentary Control Panel report of 19
December 2013, in which it informed the German Bundestag pursuant
to sec-tion 14 (1) second sentence G 10 of restrictions, including restrictions under section 5 G 10, in the period between 1 January and 31
December 2012 (Bun-destag printed paper (BT-Drs., Bundestagsdrucksache) 18/218 p. 7 et seq.). According to this report, in 2012, the
Federal Ministry of the Interior, with the agreement of the G10 Commission, ordered restrictions relating to three of the areas of risk designated in section 5 (1) third sentence G 10. These areas of risk were international terrorism, arms proliferation and conventional armaments, and illegal human smuggling. For the area of risk of international terror-ism, the order specified 1,164 search concepts (76 contentrelated and 1,088 formal) in the first half of the year and 1,065 additional search concepts (88 content-related and 977 formal) in the second
half of the year, resulting in 1,804 telecommunications fulfilling these
specifications. Of these, 595 were in the form of e-mails, 290 were in
the form of telefaxes, nine were in the form of telexes and 58 were
voice messages. In addition, 816 communication datasets and 36 short
messages were collected. As a result, 137 of the selected com-munications were categorised as relevant from the point of view of intelligence.
With regard to the admissibility of his action for a declaratory
judgment, the claimant asserts that in 2012, he sent to or received
from abroad far more than 1,000 e-mails via the provider that was
subject to monitoring. Thus, he had con-tact to many foreign clients
and colleagues in the geographic area monitored by the Federal Intelligence Service. These e-mails frequently contained matters that are
subject to the secrecy obligations of attorneys and related to technical
facts, the claimant asserts. In view of the large number of search concepts used in monitoring, the large number of hits and the large geographic area under surveillance, it was likely that his (professional) email correspondence was collected and checked for its relevance in
terms of intelligence. In the context of the guarantee of the protection
of rights of article 19 (4) first sentence GG, this was sufficient to assume the existence of a specific legal relationship that could be established within the meaning of section 43 (1) VwGO.

Reasons (abridged)

9

The action for a declaratory judgment is inadmissible.

https://www.bverwg.de/en/141216U6A9.14.0

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