The significance of the whistle-blower for a properly functioning democracy is beyond question. But even though Edward Snowden exposed the dangers of unregulated surveillance by intelligence agencies, no nation wants to grant him asylum. He is treated as if he were a dangerous criminal.
In June 2013, more than 500 experts from 70 nations requested a global program of improved protection for whistleblowers at a meeting of the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights in the South African city of Tshwane. In particular, they said whistleblowers should not be punished if the importance of their revelations outweighed continued secrecy. A few months later, in October 2013, the parliamentary assembly of the council recommended its 47 members change their national laws to comply with the recommendation.
On April 30, 2014, the committee of ministers accepted the suggestion and put it before all member states to implement. In a recently released “explanatory report” concerning the recommendation, the federal justice ministry called whistleblowing “a basic aspect of the freedom of expression and conscience,” and [stated that the government] should actively strive to make it easier for individuals to “report information about the dangers or the disadvantages of secrecy not in the public interest.”
In other words, the importance of the whistleblower to a properly functioning democracy is — at least as far as Europeans are concerned — beyond question and the necessity of protecting whistleblowers is recognized by no less than the current conservative-liberal German coalition government.
Fled Like a Persecuted Animal
If that is really so, then the German government has to consider it intolerable that the most successful and significant whistleblower in history — former NSA employee Edward Snowden — has been on the run from the U.S. criminal justice system for more than a year, finding only temporary asylum in Moscow, and that the man who complained about the death of privacy, but also empirically proved his accusations beyond any doubt and showed how democracy was being endangered by government agency spying, was forced to seek refuge in — of all places — neo-emperor Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And all because he could no longer trust the rule of law in America and the Europeans wouldn’t let him in.
But Germany apparently doesn’t find Snowden’s treatment intolerable at all. For more than a year, Germany’s politicians have been treating Snowden as if he were a hot potato and trying to decide whether they should just let him fall. The recommendations of the European Council and the justice ministry don’t have the slightest meaning because no European government — least of all, the German government — wants to risk its relationship with America, even though Snowden showed what America means by “friendship” and “partnership.”
Since Snowden’s revelations, every German knows that their country’s legal opinions and its data privacy laws aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Everyone knows that neither the laws currently on the books nor the courts can protect privacy, as long as they aren’t backed up by government policy. And everyone also knows that the German government has so far done nothing to protect private citizens from snooping carried out by foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, as it is required to do by the German Constitutional Court. Germans know this ever since Edward Snowden showed we were all being spied upon and our telephones were being tapped.
And Edward Snowden learned something this past year as well. Even Germany’s minister of justice advised Snowden to return to the United States because, surely, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life being pursued around the globe or wandering from one asylum to the next. As far as we can tell, thanks to the hesitancy of the Europeans, Snowden isn’t facing the prospect of choosing between various hiding places and fleeing from one to the next.
This apparently doesn’t disturb our minister of justice any more than the fact that despite all contrary recommendations of the European Council and the German Ministry of Justice, a whistleblower still has to fear lifelong hounding as if he were a hardened criminal. That’s the lesson for Edward Snowden and all whistleblowers still to come. If they read how the Europeans defended their right to speak, they should be reminded of Gottfried Benn’s pronouncement: “Anyone who believes people can use words to tell lies may also believe it could happen here.”