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Freedom, Security and (the) Public(ity): Notes on the 2008 Heidelberg Conference of German-speaking Public Law Assistants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Matthias Koetter

Extract

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In the last week of February 2008, the University Assistants of Public Law from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland came together in Heidelberg for their annual conference to discuss “Security, Freedom and (the) Public(ity).” A better date for the meeting could not have been chosen; on the day the conference started, the German Constitutional Court declared online searches by German intelligence agencies to be unconstitutional and came up with a new dimension of human rights protection for the privacy of computer network systems. This pathbreaking jurisprudence was omnipresent at the conference; it had already been in the opening-speech by Justice Brun-Otto Bryde (Gießen), a member of the First Senate of the Constitutional Court, which was to render its decision the very next day. It was brought up in numerous discussions during the conference and it was the main topic on the panel discussion with Paul Kirchhof (Heidelberg), a former Justice in the same Senate who was known as the “Professor from Heidelberg” during Angela Merkel's 2006 election campaign, and Fredrik Roggan, a Berlin lawyer and chairman of the civil rights association “Humanistische Union,” who argued the case before the Court. Perhaps it was all a coincidence, but questions of freedom and security have remained on the everyday agenda, in a political context as well as constitutional debates, ever since September 11, 2001.

Type
Developments
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 5 , 01 May 2008 , pp. 737 - 752
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 See Assistententagung Öffentliches Recht available at www.assistententagung.de (containing the program of the conference and for abstracts of the contributions. The conference proceedings will be published this summer). For notes on earlier conferences, see Daniel Thym, The European Constitution: Notes on the National Meeting of German Public Law Assistants, 6 German Law Journal 793 (2005), available at www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=593; Marten Breuer, Law and Medicine: Notes on the Meeting of German-Speaking Public Law Assistants in Vienna (2006), 7 German Law Journal 445 (2006), available at www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=722; and Lukas Bauer and Konrad Lachmayer, Networks in Public Law: Notes on the 47th Meeting (2007) of German-Speaking Public Law Assistants in Berlin, 8 German Law Journal 1069 (2007), available at www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=872.Google Scholar

2 Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG – Federal Constitutional Court), 1 BvR 370/07 and 1 BvR 595/07 (Feb. 27, 2008), at http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rs20080227_1bvr037007.html.Google Scholar

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24 BVerfGE 65, 1 (Dec. 15, 1983) (Census of population law).Google Scholar

25 BVerfGE 109, 279 (March 3, 2004) (Acoustic surveillance of private living space).Google Scholar

26 BVerfGE 7, 198 (Jan. 15, 1958) (Lüth); most recently BVerfGE 102, 347 (Dec. 12, 2000) (Benetton).Google Scholar

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