A German State has banned its intelligence agents from having sex with their targets.
According to an August 6 report by German news outlet Bild, authorities in Saxony-Anhalt have published a new version of its Constitutional Protection Act that limits the activities of its undercover law enforcement authorities.
The revised version implements several changes mandated by Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, which found last year that “entering into a relationship initiated by the State for the purpose of obtaining information” was illegal.
“Intimate or comparable close personal relationships with target persons are not permitted,” the court ruling added.
State Secretary at the Ministry of the Interior Tamara Zieschang has praised the revised act as a piece of legislation that created “legal certainty” for law enforcement agencies.
“By adapting the law, we are giving the Office for the Protection of the Constitution rules that are based on current legal developments,” the Christian Democrat politician said.
The ban will reportedly apply to all existing investigations that are already underway, meaning that any State informant currently in a romantic or sexual relationship with their target will be mandated by law to terminate that.
Bild clarified that it was unclear whether Saxony-Anhalt actually had any State-level undercover operatives that engaged in such activity.
It is not the first time authorities in Germany banned the practice.
The city of Bremen in northwest Germany implemented a similar restriction in 2021. One expert speculated that the decision to do so may have been influenced by controversy surrounding the practice seen in other parts of the country.
“Until a few years ago, undercover investigators with the code names ‘Iris Schneider’ and ‘Maria Block’ were active in the left-wing scene in Hamburg and had begun love affairs there,” police lawyer Kirsten Wiese commented at the time.
Wiese added that what she called the weaponisation of sex in this way represented “such a massive intervention in the personal rights of those affected that it cannot be justified by police purposes under any circumstances”.
German police forces have launched more than 360 investigations into instances of suspected hate-speech over the playing or singing of a German meme “anthem”. https://t.co/oqxvk5n3ru
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