Pirateriebekämpfung durch deutsche staatliche Stellen

German authorities are actively involved in combating the phenomenon of piracy, which raises a large number of legally unsolved questions regarding both international and German constitutional law.
This work firstly focuses on the authority of the German armed forces in this regard and discusses all international and constitutional legal bases for unilateral and multilateral forms of military operations. In the context of multilateral missions, the author develops a new approach, which deviates from the dogmatically unconvincing case law of Germany’s constitutional court concerning the relationship between art. 87a and art. 24, paragraph 2 of the country’s Basic Law.
In a further step, the study examines whether German police forces have sufficient authority to effectively combat piracy and how far German fundamental rights would extend in the case of German authorities detaining foreigners abroad.
This work is the first of its kind to provide a systematic discussion on whether Germany’s foreign intelligence service (BND) may also become actively involved in the fight against piracy. In this connection, it also discusses to what extent the legal limitations on any foreign reconnaissance conducted by the BND abroad are imposed by German law.