Parliamentary Oversight Panel (Germany)
Insofar as this is necessary for compelling reasons of access to intelligence or for reasons of protecting the personal rights of third parties, or if the core area of executive responsibility is affected, the Federal Government may both refuse to inform the PKGr about general activities and events of particular importance and to hand over files and transmit files, and also prohibit employees of the Federal Intelligence Services from providing information.Because the parliamentary right to ask questions also extends to the intelligence services, the federal government and the PKGr are obliged to provide information on urgent matters.Submissions from citizens to the German Bundestag concerning conduct by the federal intelligence services that affects them may be brought to the attention of the Parliamentary Oversight Panel (Section 8 PKGrG).Unlike the PVMG, the PKK was given a legal basis, the Law on Parliamentary Control of Federal Intelligence Activities (German: Gesetz über die parlamentarische Kontrolle nachrichtendienstlicher Tätigkeit des Bundes).Wolfgang Nešković, a non-party member of the PKGr since 2005 for the party Die Linke, was initially not confirmed by the Bundestag in December 2009, a hitherto unique occurrence.Although the PKGr cannot itself bring unlawful actions to criminal charges or order the publication of corresponding, confidential documents, it can call on the German government to put a stop to abuses.In addition, there are calls for the PKGr to be given the rights of a committee of inquiry in order to be able to effectively investigate breaches of the law (currently, for example, no evidence can be collected or witnesses summoned).However, the German Bundestag has the right to set up committees of inquiry to investigate possible misconduct in the area of the federal intelligence services, which can take evidence and summon witnesses (Section 44 of the Basic Law).In particular, increasingly far-reaching powers, in terms of online searches and source telecommunication surveillance by law enforcement agencies, raise the question of who actually monitors these measures, especially since the technology used is presumably the same.[27] Time and again, information from secret meetings of the PKGr is leaked to the mass media and thus reaches the public, including from the report on the BND journalist scandal.The PKGr asked the Bundestag President Norbert Lammert in the so-called journalist scandal at the time, to initiate legal action, because of the suspected violation of official secrets (§ 353b StGB) by the illegal disclosure of information.