Inter-Legality and Surveillance Technologies: Looking at the Demands of Justice Beyond Borders

Abstract

On the 19th of May, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that telecommunication surveillance of non-German individuals outside German territory violates the German Constitution. The reasoning of the Court entails a number of crucial questions both from the international and European human rights law perspective. The most important one being whether the German Federal Government is bound by the provisions of the German Constitution when it interferes with the rights of non-German individuals in a non-German territory. Relying on international human rights law, the Court answered affirmatively. The reasoning of the judgment has demonstrated a successful example of Inter-legality. Therefore, this paper aims at analyzing the judgment from such a perspective through a three-step analysis: Taking the vantage point of the affair – the case at hand - under scrutiny, understanding the relevant normativities controlling the case, looking at the demands of justice stemming from the case. It concludes that such an inter-legal reasoning provided the Court to close ‘virtual legal black holes’, and avoid injustice.