BMI: Transparency Act a "private matter" for the Minister

The intention is to "strengthen our democracy through more transparency", as stated on page 9 of the coalition agreement (PDF) of the traffic light coalition of 2021, which is almost 150 pages long: "We are guided by the principles of open government – transparency, participation and cooperation." To this end, one of the aims was to combine the existing federal information laws(IFG, UIG and VIG) into a federal transparency law and reform these outdated laws. And instead of only releasing information at the request of individuals, as was previously the case, the authorities are to proactively put their files online in future with a modernized law based on the Hamburg model.

But these fine plans will probably come to nothing. This is because there are still apparently influential opponents of government transparency in the civil service of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), which is responsible for drawing up a government draft. They already obstructed the development of the Freedom of Information Act planned by the red-green coalition under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder from 1998. The draft was simply never completed. In the end, some SPD and Green MPs, with the support of the then opposition FDP parliamentary group, introduced their own parliamentary draft in 2005, so that the Freedom of Information Act could come into force at the beginning of 2006 as the last project of the red-green coalition.

Inquiries "intrusive"

A similar disaster is currently looming, especially as there are increasing signs of a possible premature end to the coalition. The draft bill, which was supposed to be available in 2023, is still not in sight. The ministry is evasive in its answers to questions about the project. Journalists who even inquire about the personal interests of Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) and want to know, for example, when she last asked the civil servants under her leadership, find themselves exposed to accusations from the ministry: The attempted observation of the minister's behavior is "intrusive and, on the one hand, violates the privacy of our head of authority", according to an internal statement from the legal department to a spokesperson for the ministry in response to an inquiry from the magazine c't, which is available to heise online. The BMI did not want to provide any further information on the question of when the minister last enquired about the work.

The minister was last "concerned" with the matter in mid-September, the authority spokesperson said. Her ministry will not reveal exactly what Faeser's involvement with the draft law for which she is responsible is supposed to have consisted of. "To infer the Minister's material interest from the way she was briefed on the drafting of a specific bill that was not problematized in the current political discussion ... can therefore only lead to inaccurate fake news, in the creation of which the BMI does not participate by providing detailed information on the behavior of the head of the authority," her legal department writes to the press department.

However, the fact that the missing draft law is not currently under political discussion is clearly false. Due to the ongoing delay in the government's plans, an "Alliance for Transparency Law" was formed in April by a total of ten civil society organizations and called on the ministry in a petition to finally implement the federal transparency law promised in the coalition agreement. The alliance includes abgeordnetenwatch.de, the German Society for Freedom of Information, the German Association of Journalists, FragDenStaat, LobbyControl, Netzwerk Recherche, Transparency International Deutschland and Wikimedia Deutschland. Within just a few weeks, the appeal received over 50,000 signatures of support on a relevant online platform.

(tig)