Hans-Georg Maaßen takes legal action against the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The reason: there he is classified as an “extreme right-wing object of observation.”

Former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen Photo: Jana Rodenbusch/Reuters

COLOGNE dpa | The Cologne Administrative Court has acknowledged receipt of a lawsuit by former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen, against the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. In addition to the lawsuit, Maaßen also filed an urgent application. Consequently, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution should be obliged to refrain from classifying him as a “far-right object of observation”, to observe him and to collect and store data. It is not yet clear when the court will decide on the urgent request, a court spokesperson said on Tuesday.

At the end of January it became known that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution had stored data on its former president in the information system of the authority in the field of the extreme right. Maaßen is federal president of the Union of Values ​​party, founded in mid-February and which plans to run in the East German state elections in the fall.

The current president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, has repeatedly stressed that his agency is politically neutral, but must be alert against possible enemies of the Constitution. “In postwar history, democracy in our country has rarely been in danger as it is today,” he wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.