The Bavarian state government is surprisingly planning a new amendment to the Police Tasks Act. At major events in the Free State, the police should in future be given the right to subject visitors to a so-called background check. This means that people’s personal data can be queried “from public and non-public bodies” and brought together by the police. The Interior Committee of the State Parliament already adopted a corresponding new Article 60a on Wednesday with the votes of the CSU and Free Voters.
Fierce criticism has arisen against the bill. The lawyer Markus Löffelmann, who was for years a judge at the Munich Regional Court and most recently a judge in a State Security Senate at the Munich Higher Regional Court, said the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “I think that this can be a gateway for something that is known as social crediting. If you want to participate in social life, you can only do so by giving your consent to a police screening.” He is thinking, for example, of football games in the Allianz Arena or concerts.
Öffelmann, who currently teaches as a professor of security law at the Federal University for Public Administration in Berlin, calls the planned change in the law “very serious”. They have a “huge spread”. The text of the law speaks of “events and series of events” at which background checks could take place in the future; according to the reasons for the draft law by the CSU and Free Voters, this screening could reach a “large scale” at major events.
The decisive passage of the draft law reads: “On occasions that are associated with considerable security risks, the police can collect, transmit and otherwise process personal data of a person with their written or electronic consent from public and non-public bodies, insofar as this is with regard to the occasion and the activity of the data subject is necessary and appropriate. “
This wording leaves “completely open which group of people is affected,” criticized vonöffelmann. Also, “it is not specified at all which data is used. This can be any data.” In other federal states, the police already have the right to query people’s data as a preventive measure in order to carry out a background check. In Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse, for example, the police law contains corresponding rules. However, it is restricted to occupational groups that deal with particular security risks. Employees at airports across Germany, for example, also have to be screened; the details are regulated in the Aviation Security Act. “This is now being expanded,” says the lawyer Löffelmann – “to all citizens in Bavaria.”
Law professor Mark Zöller, managing director of the Institute for Digitization and Internal Security Law at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, sees it similarly. He even speaks of a “step towards the surveillance state”. This is “a whole new dimension of surveillance and control”, a “dream of Chinese conditions”. In the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, from which the new draft law originates, there are top lawyers who are not inclined to accidentally forget anything. The fact that Bavaria does not want to limit its screening to certain professional groups is just as conspicuous as the lack of involvement of the data protection officer in the new regulation.
“What makes me particularly suspicious is the way in which this regulation was introduced,” says Markus Löffelmann. “At 7 p.m. on Tuesday, the motion was submitted to the state parliament, and a vote was to take place the next morning.” There was no hearing of experts. The second and third reading of the planned amendment to the law in the state parliament is scheduled for mid-July.