Hacker News Reader

Comment by sergj | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone more information on the german secret court referenced in the article? As a german this is my first time hearing about that.

View on HN

It's said to be a new control/review committee, probably without the rule to be transparent, and hasn't been created yet. As the article says it's already deemed unconstitutional before it even started.

German source: "Die Kontrolle soll stattdessen nur noch nachlaufend durch ein neues Spezialgremium erfolgen." https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/NSA-Skandal-und-BND-...

Update: the existing control committees for G10 (article 10 of Grundgesetz = German constitution) are staffed with members of the parliament and one has to be lawyer. I don't think that makes it a court, maybe it's just a matter of translation.

German source on G10 committees https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artikel_10-Gesetz#Verfahren

If the committee performs a judicial review which in this context I am understanding it does it is technically a "court".

It's not a judicial review, the PKG (parliamentary control committee) and the G10 Kommittee, which is a subset of the PKG, both consist of members of Parliament, and they do the same work (keeping an eye on the executive branch's work) - just for efforts whose information is considered too sensitive for wider distribution.

My german is a bit rusty but doesn't "gerichtlicher prüfung" translates into "court examination" or more precisely "judicial review"?

The Wikipedia article states (correctly) that there is no judicial review in the usual case. The parliamentary committee does not perform that.

"Die anstelle gerichtlicher Prüfung des Sachverhalts vorgesehenen politischen Kontrollgremien haben sich in der Vergangenheit aber oft als unzulänglich erwiesen:"

translates to (while keeping the sentence structure the same as much as possible, even if that sounds a bit off in english):

"The, in place of judicial review of the factual matter, arranged political control committees have shown in the past to often be insufficient:"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com