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A police chief inspector took legal action against the identification requirement – ultimately unsuccessfully. The Federal Constitutional Court dismissed the applicant’s constitutional complaint.


You can somehow understand the chief inspector who complained. As a police officer, he navigates more problematic neighborhoods and faces not always easy situations. He is the first person to defend the state and its rules. It is often filmed with a cell phone.

Policewoman defends herself against labeling requirements

It is quite possible that the surname of the officer caught on camera, which can be clearly legible on the uniform, later entered the search engines. Could this be used to identify a broader personality profile of the officer? Not excluded.

In 2013, Brandenburg became the first federal state to impose a legal requirement to identify police officers. In the case of a group of hundreds of people, the name tag is replaced with an abbreviation consisting of letters and numbers. For policewomen, this is a violation of their right to informational self-determination. He applied for an exemption from the labeling requirement and filed a lawsuit against it – ultimately unsuccessfully.

Historic decision from the Federal Administrative Court

The Federal Constitutional Court has finally said that the obligation to identify police officers in Brandenburg is constitutional. At the end of September 2019, the Federal Administrative Court of Leipzig delivered the principal specialized court decision in the police officer’s case and dismissed his complaint.

Decisive: The decision of the Federal Administrative Court stated that the labeling measure serves to “strengthen citizen proximity and transparency of police work”. It also ensures that “any criminal offenses or minor breaches of duty are more easily clarified and thus prevented by police officers”.

The labeling obligation also serves to protect legal authorities who would be exempt from investigation if a report went directly to the right person. This decision was followed with interest by many other federal states with such an obligation, such as Hesse, Thuringia, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen.

The Constitutional Court complains of lack of justification

The officer lodged a constitutional complaint with the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe against this negative decision of the higher administrative judges in Leipzig. This was now rejected as inadmissible by the 3rd Chamber of the Second Senate of the highest German court.

Main reason: The constitutional complaint was not sufficiently justified. The right to informational self-determination is also not unlimited. Constitutional judges complain that the police officer exposed himself to certain danger by revealing his name on his uniform. Moreover, the state of Brandenburg stated that the labeling obligation was unproblematic – the plaintiff did not discuss the content of this argument in her constitutional complaint.

The Constitutional Court also stated that the clerks in public institutions also stated their names in the correspondence; judges would also give their names in a decision. It is here that the court overlooked a detailed rationale: The court asked “what danger the police officer actually faces, beyond the exposure to all policemen who perform official acts by announcing their names”. And we came to the conclusion: the labeling requirement is legitimate.

Christoph Schneider is editor at Law & Justice, the specialist editorial office at ZDF.

Source: ZDF

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