Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl won a major legal battle today when a court ruled that Germany could not release his East German secret police file without his permission.
Mr Kohl, who has seen his once towering reputation badly damaged by a slush fund scandal, filed a lawsuit against a government agency to stop the release of phone-tap transcripts recorded by communist East Germany's Stasi.
The federal government agency overseeing the Stasi files said earlier this year it wanted to release those files deemed to be of historical interest.
"Our client, Dr Helmut Kohl, welcomes the Berlin administrative court's decision," said attorney Mr Stephan Holthoff-Pfoertner.
"Files about any victim, including historically significant figures, with personal information gathered by crude, illegal means cannot be read without their permission," he said.
East Germany operated the world's largest espionage operation during the Cold War, focusing on West Germany, and used the data to impress its KGB allies in Moscow.
It closely monitored top German politicians, seeking insight about their political thinking, personal lives and peccadilloes.
Post-unification German law allows any person to see his own Stasi files. Journalists and researchers have also been given access to files of historically significant figures.
Mr Kohl's lawyers and members of parliament had warned that the tapes might contain private material obtained illegally but may also have been manipulated by the Stasi, making them unreliable.
"The court has backed the position of the plaintiff," judge Volker Markworth of the Berlin administrative court ruled.
Documents released after the collapse of East Germany in 1989 showed Stasi agents had massive amounts of material from wiretaps on nearly 100 phone lines in Mr Kohl's offices. They produced 9,000 pages of records on the ex-West German leader.
East German agents had taps on 100,000 phones in all of West Germany.
Mr Kohl, once hailed as the father of German reunification, has fought to restore his reputation after he admitted accepting $1 million in undeclared, and thus illegal, campaign donations while in office.
He paid a fine of 300,000 marks ($132,000) to end a criminal fraud probe. He still faces an 18-month-old parliamentary probe.
Figure skating star Ms Katarina Witt, who lived in East Germany, has also recently taken action to halt the release of her Stasi files, saying they are intimate as diaries.