Legal Victory: German Domestic Intelligence Service ends surveillance of BDS Berlin after ELSC’s legal intervention
The German Domestic Intelligence Service Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) has ended its surveillance and listing of the Palestine solidarity group BDS Berlin after ELSC’s legal pressure.
In pre-trial proceedings, the Verfassungsschutz has yielded to the legal action initiated by The European Legal Support Center (ELSC) through partner lawyer Ammar Bustami against the secret service’s listing of BDS Berlin as an “extremist” group. In a letter they stated: “The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has ceased surveillance of your client and will henceforth no longer classify them as a ‘confirmed extremist’.”
In fact, the secret service has neither named the Palestine solidarity groups BDS Berlin nor BDS Bonn in its recently released “Verfassungsschutzbericht 2025” (Constitutional Protection Report 2025). Both groups were first named in the report last year, which led to the ELSC’s legal intervention on behalf of BDS Berlin.
“BDS-affiliated groups” – catch-all phrase fails legal inspection
This comes after various branches of the secret service Verfassungsschutz have labelled the BDS movement as “extremist” for almost a decade now. The secret service office for the German federal state of Berlin has first named the BDS movement in its report for 2017, considering “their demands for an unconditional right of return for Palestinians and equating Israel with the South African apartheid regime, some segments of the BDS movement call into question Israel’s right to exist and imply that Israel as a whole is fundamentally racist’’.
Presenting this reasoning as evidence for alleged ‘extremism’ and the surveillance of Palestine solidarity groups was expanded by the secret service after the German Parliament Bundestag adopted an “Anti-BDS resolution” in 2019, declaring BDS to be ‘antisemitic’ and calling upon German state institutions to counteract it. That same year, the German government publicly called for surveillance of the BDS movement.
“BDS-affiliated groups’’ has since become a stigmatised catch-all phrase for Palestine solidarity groups in Germany. The Verfassungsschutz uses this term in its latest report to declare another ELSC client, Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost e.V./ Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East – EJJP Germany e. V., as “extremist as corroborated by hard evidence”. Our legal action on behalf of Jüdische Stimme is still ongoing, but we have already secured a favourable ruling at the Berlin Administrative Court (Verwaltungsgericht Berlin).
Effectively, the Verfassungsschutz designates ‘BDS-affiliation’ as a ‘sign of extremism’. However, the secret service can provide no legal argument for the designation and the resulting surveillance of an actual BDS group like BDS Berlin, which as a legal entity has the right to object against it in court. Instead, the secret service yields in pre-trial. This should raise serious doubts about the designation of ‘BDS-affiliation’ to be a ‘sign of extremism’ and indicates worrying violations of fundamental rights guaranteed by the German constitution, such as freedom of expression and political association.
The deployment of the secret service against Palestine solidarity in Germany
Despite our legal victories, we have no expectation that the Verfassungsschutz will end its unconstitutional repression of Palestine solidarity groups. Specifically, we don’t expect it to stop declaring a loosely defined ‘BDS-affiliation’ and other expressions of Palestine solidarity as extremist. However, we have achieved yet another legal victory on behalf of a Palestine solidarity group in Germany. This case has exposed how the German state’s control mechanisms tasked with overseeing the Verfassungsschutz have clearly failed their duty for democratic control and overview of the secret service’s conduct and instead allowed undemocratic and unconstitutional repression of Palestine solidarity.
It is important to keep in mind that Germany is deeply complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. We assume the deployment of the domestic secret service Verfassungsschutz against Palestine solidarity groups is one crucial step to silence domestic critics and to avoid accountability. The ELSC will therefore continue to challenge the Verfassungsschutz for their surveillance of Palestine solidarity groups in Germany.
We have invited several groups the ELSC is legally supporting against the Verfassungsschutz and ELSC partner lawyer Ammar Bustami, who is representing the groups in the proceedings, to our latest online info-event. They talked about how the classification by the domestic intelligence services affects their political activities, why they’ve decided to take legal action against it, shared insights into their cases, and answered questions from the audience. The full event (in German language) is now available on our YouTube-channel: here.
You can support our efforts to defend Palestine Solidarity Groups from German Intelligence Surveillance here.
