The Kontaktsperre: West Germany's 1977 Contact Ban and Why It Stayed Contested

In September 1977 West Germany cut imprisoned terrorism suspects off from each other and their lawyers, then wrote a law to cover it after the fact.

29 October 2026 · Part of Cold War — a guide to 22 articles →

On 6 September 1977, the day after the kidnapping of the employers' president Hanns Martin Schleyer, West German prison authorities cut the imprisoned leadership of the Red Army Faction off from one another, from the outside world and from their own lawyers. There was no statute for it. Parliament wrote one in a matter of days, passed it on 29 September, and the Federal Constitutional Court upheld it the following year, yet the Kontaktsperre has been argued over ever since.

The kidnapping and the gap in the law

On 5 September 1977 Schleyer was seized in Cologne and the people travelling with him were killed: a driver and three police officers. The kidnappers demanded the release of imprisoned members of the group, most of them held at Stammheim in Stuttgart. The setting is described in our article on Stammheim as a building. The sequence that followed is told in the German Autumn day by day.

The state's working suspicion was that the prisoners were helping to steer the kidnapping from their cells, and that their lawyers were a channel for messages. Whether that suspicion was fully borne out is not something this article can settle; the point for the law is that the authorities acted on it. The Federal Minister of Justice, Hans-Jochen Vogel, could rely only on the idea of justified necessity in section 34 of the Criminal Code, and the Bundestag's own retrospective states that no statutory basis for the measure existed. The ban was imposed first and legalised afterwards.

What the ban did

In practice the measure meant isolation inside a prison that was already one of the most tightly guarded in the country. Prisoners designated under it lost contact with fellow inmates, with visitors and with correspondence. The most contentious element was the interruption of communication with defence counsel. In ordinary criminal procedure, confidential access to a lawyer is the guarantee on which most other rights depend, and the ban suspended it for terrorism suspects.

The prisoners and many of their lawyers described the regime as isolation torture, a charge the authorities rejected. The Bundestag's retrospective records that numerous lawyers and human-rights advocates saw in the law a break with the rule of law itself. Both sides were arguing from interests, which is why the later court ruling matters more than either side's rhetoric.

A law in three days

The statute amended the introductory act to the Courts Constitution Act. It was passed by the Bundestag on 29 September 1977 by 371 votes to 4 with 17 abstentions, signed the following day, and in force from 2 October. It allowed a ban on contact where there was a present danger to life, limb or liberty of a person, where facts supported the suspicion of a terrorist association, and where the measure was necessary to avert the danger. Legislators of nearly all parties accepted that the state could not leave the existing ban without a legal foundation, and the speed of passage was itself part of the later criticism.

Used once

A telling fact about the law is how little it was used. According to the Federal Government's later report to the Bundestag, the statute was applied on one occasion only: during the Schleyer kidnapping. A power rushed through in an emergency, then left unused for a generation, is the kind of measure that defenders call a necessary reserve and critics call an emergency law that should never have outlived its emergency.

The deaths at Stammheim in the night of 17 to 18 October fall inside the period of the ban. The official investigations concluded that three prisoners took their own lives; doubts about how the weapons reached the cells have persisted, and the question has never been settled to the satisfaction of every observer. This article does not choose between those accounts. What can be said is that the isolation of the prisoners, and their separation from counsel, is a reason the circumstances of their deaths drew so much suspicion.

Karlsruhe's answer

Several people subject to the ban brought constitutional complaints. On 1 August 1978 the Second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court decided, under case numbers 2 BvR 1013, 1019 and 1034/77, that the law was compatible with the Basic Law. The ruling is the legal anchor of the whole episode: a court that had no interest in embarrassing the government nevertheless reviewed the law, and found it constitutional.

That did not end the argument. The ruling concerned this statute in the circumstances of 1977, and critics continued to object that a ban on confidential access to counsel sits uneasily with the principle that a defendant must be able to speak freely to a lawyer.

The law after the autumn

The statute stayed on the books, with later adjustments. In 1984 a new section 34a added a safeguard: on application, a lawyer could be assigned to a prisoner under a contact ban as a contact person, a change prepared in parliamentary papers of the early 1980s. Decades later, European law reopened the old objection. A 2013 EU directive on access to a lawyer in criminal proceedings led the Federal Ministry of Justice in 2015 to propose that a contact ban should no longer be able to reach the defence lawyer, and a 2017 act amended the provisions on the ban in sections 31 to 36 to allow counsel contact in some cases.

For the wider climate in which measures like this were accepted, see the Rasterfahndung, which traces how the same years reshaped German privacy law. For how the group presented its own side, see the Kommando statement, and for the other European hostage crisis of those years, Stockholm in 1975. The long aftermath of the group's campaign is covered in the third generation, and our record of these operations places 1977 in the sequence of the whole.

Conclusion

The Kontaktsperre is a case study in how a democracy improvises under pressure. The measure came first and the law second; the law passed almost unanimously and was upheld by the highest court; and it was used once. None of that makes it uncontroversial. It remains contested because it touched the one right that a trial depends on, and because its application coincided with deaths whose circumstances are still disputed. The honest account holds all of this together: lawful by the court's judgment, defensible in the eyes of many at the time, and a standing example of the cost of acting first and legislating afterwards.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Kontaktsperre? It was a ban on contact imposed on prisoners held on terrorism-related charges, cutting them off from other inmates, outside visitors and, most controversially, their defence lawyers. It was first applied at Stammheim on 6 September 1977 and written into law at the end of that month.

Was the contact ban legal when it was first imposed? Not on the basis of any specific statute. The Justice Minister could rely only on the general principle of justified necessity in the Criminal Code, which is why the Bundestag passed the Kontaktsperregesetz within weeks to give the measure a legal basis.

Did the Federal Constitutional Court approve the law? Yes. On 1 August 1978 the Second Senate found the law compatible with the Basic Law. The decision settled the law's legality in 1977 conditions, but it did not end the debate about whether such a ban should reach a defendant's own lawyer.

Is the law still in force? Provisions on the contact ban remain in the introductory act to the Courts Constitution Act, but they have been amended, notably in 1984 and again by a 2017 act that implemented a European directive on access to a lawyer.

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