Constitutional complaint against evaluation of the fake app AN0M inadmissible

When in doubt, the German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) assumes that US authorities “observe the principles of the rule of law and the protection of human rights when obtaining (evidence).” The BVerfG therefore rejects the complaint of a person convicted in Germany with US legal assistance as inadmissible.

The background to the proceedings is the allegedly encrypting app AN0M (also known as ANOM), which more than ten thousand suspects are said to have fallen for. In fact, law enforcement officers from Australia, the USA, and an unknown EU member state were behind it. The suspects believed they were using a particularly secure communication service, paid fees for it, but fell into the trap. Their chats traveled from the app to the EU member state, from there to the FBI, and then from there again to European law enforcement agencies, including in Germany and Austria.

Based on the chats assigned to him, a man was sentenced to prison by the Mannheim Regional Court for trafficking cannabis in not a small quantity. As a result of the secret surveillance and the lack of disclosure of who collected the chat content and how it was assigned to him, he felt that his right to a fair trial under the rule of law and his general right to privacy had been violated and appealed to the Federal Constitutional Court.

Not accepted for decision

The court has now made short work of the constitutional complaint and has not even accepted it for a decision. According to the three judges, the petition was not conclusive and did not raise any constitutional concerns regarding the utilization of the AN0M data. Whether the unknown EU state has broken its law by passing on data to the FBI is irrelevant for a possible ban on evidence in Germany. The decisive factor is the behavior of the state that gave the data to Germany, in this case the USA. And there were no indications that the USA “could have violated the principles of the rule of law and the protection of human rights when obtaining the evidence.”

Any violation of US law, in turn, is irrelevant because it does not apply to surveillance conducted outside the USA. Finally, the Federal Constitutional Court also points out that, irrespective of the specific case, it has no indication that the data harvested from AN0M is fundamentally subject to a ban on the utilization of evidence under German constitutional law. The case reference of the decision of 23 September 2025 is 2 BvR 625/25.

(ds)