German prosecutor sacked over Netzpolitik treason probe
bbc.com
bbc.com
This is wrong.
The investigation was never paused. Last week the prosecutor did claim he would pause the investigation, but that was a misleading claim from the very beginning - with the sole purpose to calm the public. Although that didn't work out (the demonstrations happened nevertheless), it achieved some strange success: The media keep repeating and repeating that, despite having no evidence that anything was ever paused.
The only "pause" that exists is that the investigation is currently waiting for an assessment ("Gutachten"). However, that is normal part of the investigation and would have happened anyway. So this is "waiting" (passive), not "pausing" (active). The prosecutor didn't do anything here to pause the investigation.
The next prosecutor would have to be extraordinarily stupid to get involved in this affair any further than required to put an official stop to the investigation.
I really hope that the investigation will be dropped officially. If it will mere be discontinued and put on ice, this would have a really bad psychological effect on Markus and André. Even if it is 99.999% sure that they won't face any repression, having the investigation dropped would be a clear cut, and enable them to be truly relieved.
In the US you'd need a declaratory judgment to deal with the threat of "legal action at some later point". But I think that's a civil law concept -- I have no idea how that would go in criminal law.
In this case, however, I think Range actually wanted to be retired. He has taken so much fire over his apparently incompetent statements relating to NSA spying (among others he confused NSA and NASA on multiple occasions) that he probably wanted to get out of what is otherwise a fairly quiet job. In particular since there is pretty much nothing to gain anymore in this case.
Paranoia tinfoil theory: Ronge was blackmailed by German spooks to hold the line for them, no matter what. Better to lose a year of pension than your reputation...
Granted, I am not familiar with German systems for changing laws, but if we doesn't like prosecutors enforcing unjust laws, we should change the laws to make publishing state secrets legal in limited cases (e.g. when it serves a public good), not make show of firing a prosecutor who is enforcing laws and about to retire anyway. It simply isn't wise to rely on prosecutorial discretion for justice to persevere over unjust laws, as that's simply not their role in the judicial system.
After 16 years of Kohl fiddling his thumbs and 10 years of Merkel glueing hers together, I'm not sure Germans are any more.
They are against (part of) the German government as well as Germany's secret service ("Bundesnachrichtendienst", BND) for their extensive cooperation with the NSA.
It's also very questionable if Maas was indeed "just" enforcing laws, at least he was strangely selective in doing so (for some reason, he was very reluctant to enforce similar laws in the NSA-spy-affair). It's also very questionable of the accusations of treason against journalists only doing their job would have held up in court.
So the simple explanation is that the Generalbundesanwalt went too far, his superior had to act to avoid loosing face, and all this speculation about empty gestures, unjust laws or whatever is completely unnecessary.
Still, I think it's better to limit prosecutorial power by changing laws than to rely on prosecutorial discretion, i.e. I'd prefer he get fired for "this is a wholly baseless prosecution that has no place under our laws", not for "this is an unpopular prosecution that your boss told you to drop".
Discontinuing is not the same as pausing, but hey.
Range (the prosecutor) was sacked not for the prosecution itself, but for accusing the minister of justice of interfering with the prosecution.
Range had plenty of material to cover his ass for the prosecution itself, including an expertise that the leaked material was indeed state secret, the fact that the ministry knew about the investigation, and a solid initial suspicion.
Most of the rights already come pre-holed with exceptions, though. And lots of them contradict each other. There's lots of leeway, to justify a very wide range of policies as different `tradeoffs' between the rights.
I think the reason for this is mainly less budget partly due to the fact, that the German agencies are often not federal agencies, e.g. each tiny state has their own Verfassungsschutz.
I mean, the NSU affair was really bad, but incompetent-criminals-bad not secret-state-government-bad.
On the other hand, it is a very bad sign for the democratic system of the this country, when now even a warning from the OSZE has arrived in this topic. I remember years, when only third- and fourth-world or Eastern Bloc countries got such warnings and in the German tv it was shown, so we Germans could smile and say, that we are better than "those".