City Councilor Ilsanker: Video surveillance in the monastery garden is illegal!

City Councilor Ilsanker: Video surveillance in the monastery garden is illegal!

Current developments related to video surveillance in the Passau monastery garden provide lively discussions. Josef Ilsanker, City Councilor of Passau, has announced that it will take new legal steps against the controversial surveillance. According to the city council, the city of Passau has again activated the cameras in the monastery garden despite clear judicial judgments. These decisions contradict the judgments of the Federal Administrative Court and the Bavarian Administrative Court, which have regarded surveillance as illegal, as Mediendek.

The green area "Klostergarten" has been monitored with video cameras since the end of 2018, with the city claiming that this serves to prevent vandalism and strengthen the feeling of security. A Passau citizen had sued this surveillance, supported by the Society for Freedom Rights (GFF). The lawsuit was initially dismissed as inadmissible, but the Bavarian Administrative Court later found that the city could not present sufficient data that identified the monastery garden as a focus of crime.

Legal argument goes on to

ilsanker sees the judicial decisions as clear instructions and argues that the monastery garden is not more dangerous than other inner city areas. The city administration is criticized because it has transferred the camera work to a trustee to avoid the court ruling. "Here the city administration is wrong if it believes that he can handle the proportionality requirements," said Ilsanker in view of the concern about data protection. Even if the video recordings are stored in encrypted form, the question of fundamental rights remains in space.

The GFF, which has become active in the case of the Passau monastery garden, emphasizes that public places are places of social interaction and talk in video surveillance, which would only be permitted within narrow limits. According to the judgment of the Bavarian Administrative Court, the interests of the persons affected by the surveillance predominated the urban security interests.

data protection in focus

The topic of data protection is a permanent hot iron when it comes to video surveillance in Germany. According to the federal representative for data protection and freedom of information, the trend to expand video surveillance will continue to be promoted. More and more state institutions are relying on intelligent systems for monitoring, which are also used in critical areas such as vehicle license plates or facials. Data protection is often considered to be problematic here, since it intervenes in the right of personal rights of the citizens, which makes the high legal requirements for video surveillance inevitable, as on bfdi is indicated.

This increasing technologization not only raises questions of the rule of law, but can also lead to a comprehensive surveillance of public space, which could play in the hands of authoritarian -minded governments. Ilsanker is aware of this danger and appeals to the public and politics of respecting judgments and warned of the consequences of disregarding fundamental rights.