German MPs to Hold Special Session on U.S. Spy Claims
The German parliament will hold a special session next month to assess the impact of mass U.S. surveillance including the alleged tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel phone, deputies said Monday.
The heads of the parliamentary groups of Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats, the two parties in talks on forming the next German government, agreed to call the debate on November 18, a CDU spokesman said.
Until now leftist opposition deputies had led calls for a special parliamentary hearing on the suspicion that surfaced last week that U.S. spies had been monitoring Merkel's communications.
Merkel confronted U.S. President Barack Obama last Wednesday with evidence uncovered in classified documents provided by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
Several deputies have called for Snowden, who has sought asylum at a secret location in Russia, to be summoned to give evidence in a probe of the National Security Agency's activities in Germany.
Federal prosecutors also said last week that they had opened a preliminary investigation into whether German laws were broken during U.S. surveillance operations.
A justice ministry spokesman told a regular government news conference that there was no legal obstacle to inviting Snowden to testify "provided that he is in a position where he is now to have an address to receive an invitation".
Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert fielded reporters' questions for over an hour on the affair, which has deeply strained relations with Washington, saying that Berlin hoped to quickly get to the bottom of the scandal first revealed by German news magazine Der Spiegel.
"We are checking whether this information can be substantiated," he said.
"If so, this would be grave and a breach of confidence" between Germany and the United States.
He noted that a summoning of the U.S. ambassador to Berlin last Thursday was a "rare" event "and it is an expression of the deep concern that these allegations of course triggered here and the urgency for this matter to be cleared up".
He noted that the close alliance between Washington and Berlin had endured for several decades.
"It has done us Germans a great service and continues to occupy a central place in our foreign policy," he said.
"And it is... precisely for this reason that we must do what we can to restore confidence where it may have been jeopardized or lost. We are optimistic that we can do this, in cooperation with the Americans."