GERMANY: Eastern German politicians and civil rights campaigners have attacked plans to water down background checks for uncovering former spies for East Germany's secret service, the Stasi.
They fear an effective amnesty for Stasi informers who have yet to be uncovered when a 15- year-old law that orders background checks on all public service employees - and bans Stasi informers - expires at the end of the year.
The successor law will widen the categories of public officials required to undergo a background check but limit the need for those checks to cases where there is a "real indication" of co-operation with the Stasi, such as a Stasi file.
The new law adds that, for lower-ranking civil servants, "the fact of working for the State Security [ Stasi] . . . can no longer be judged to his or her disadvantage".
Dieter Althaus, state premier of the eastern state of Thuringia, is leading a revolt against the new law and he has proposed an alternative law to preserve indefinitely the status quo of Stasi checks.
"You cannot draw a line under reappraising Stasi wrongs. We want that this work can be continued without time limits," he told Die Welt newspaper.
The Stasi was established in 1950 to protect the socialist German state. Its most infamous achievement in its 40-year history was its archive of 17 million files, which filled 178km of shelves.
Its main source of information was its extraordinary network of 250,000 full-time and part-time informers who spied on their fellow citizens, with an estimated one Stasi informer for every 68 people.
Many people co-operated willingly with the authorities to inform on friends, neighbours and even family members, while others were blackmailed and threatened into co-operating.
Germany has been a model of openness in allowing citizens access to their own Stasi files and their often poisonous contents. Stasi revelations about famous figures are still a regular occurrence that can end high-profile careers and marriages.
German government sources reject criticism that the new law will close the book on Stasi investigations, pointing out that candidates for higher public office will still be checked.
Lawyers have advised the government that any crime a Stasi informer may have committed, even if never uncovered, would probably be outside the statue of limitations after 15 years. Also, a so-called Berufsverbot or job ban could not be used forever as a punishment for Stasi co-operation because it would no longer be commensurate with the crime, an important principle in German law.
But the legal and moral arguments for drawing a line under the Stasi past have been challenged by civil rights campaigners who say it is an inopportune time to water down the Stasi checks.
In the past few months, former Stasi officers have reorganised to launch a campaign of revisionism and intimidation of their former victims.
In April, a discussion at the former Stasi prison in Berlin, now a museum, was interrupted by former guards who described the museum as a "phony chamber of horrors" and former inmates as "liars".