A lawsuit filed today before the Göttingen Administrative Court by 45-year-old radio editor Kai Budler against the Lower Saxony Office for the Protection of the Constitution (VS) dates back to 2011. The lawsuit seeks the complete deletion of the personal data stored about the journalist by the Lower Saxony Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The Administrative Court largely granted the plaintiff's claim.
Following a request for information in 2011, the Lower Saxony Office for the Protection of the Constitution informed the journalist's lawyer that it had been monitoring him for years and had stored personal data about him. According to this information, Budler had, for example, worked at StadtRadio Göttingen since 2000 and had also participated in demonstrations since 2007. Allegedly, further information about Budler was classified as secret with reference to a so-called confidentiality order and was not disclosed to either the plaintiff or the court.
The administrative court made it clear during the oral proceedings that working at a radio station and attending demonstrations had nothing to do with anti-constitutional activities. However, the domestic intelligence agency (VS) failed to provide the necessary evidence of anti-constitutional activities, even during the oral proceedings. Accordingly, the court has now ordered the VS to delete all entries transmitted to the plaintiff from the electronic files and to block them in the paper files. The lawsuit was dismissed only with regard to the deletion of the classified files, as the deletion request had not been sufficiently specific in this respect.
The plaintiff's lawyer, Sven Adam, expressed satisfaction with the outcome of the proceedings: "I hope that this signal from the judiciary will be taken up by the leadership of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Lower Saxony Ministry of the Interior, and that the change of thinking there will continue. Because, according to today's ruling, the previous practice of this authority was clearly unlawful, even in the case of Kai Budler.".
The administrative court has not admitted the appeal against today's judgment. Whether the proceedings will ultimately have to continue before the Higher Administrative Court of Lower Saxony in Lüneburg can only be definitively determined after the written grounds for the judgment have been issued.
