2005 German visa affair
commentators have suggested that the increase in the number of Ukrainians visiting Germany may have promoted a more positive view of Western Europe, assisting the Orange Revolution.
On 2 May 2001 embassies worldwide were advised to accept the Carnet de Touriste travel insurance introduced by Helmut Kohl's CDU in 1995.
They were accepted in place of a written guarantee by a German citizen to prove that the visa applicant could finance his stay and his return home.
The Foreign Office also advised the embassies to accept similar travel insurance documents from the Reiseschutz AG, owned by private entrepreneur Kübler.
On 8 February 2002 the German ambassador in Kyiv, Dietmar Stüdemann, reported that the embassy was flooded with applicants proving their credit-worthiness with travel insurance documents.
In February 2004, a German regional court found the defendant, Ukrainian-born Anaton Berg, guilty of people trafficking and smuggling.
On 12 February 2005 Ludger Volmer retired as the Speaker for Foreign Affairs of the Green Party's parliamentary group in the Bundestag, after the media criticized his work as a consultant for the company Synthesis GmbH, which worked for the Bundesdruckerei, the agency privatized in 1994, producing identity cards, banknotes and other secure documents.
Eckart von Klaeden said on the main German television channel ZDF that the Commission of Inquiry wanted to investigate the differing statement of Fischer in March 2005.
On 21 April the Commission of Inquiry heard Ludger Volmer and the State Secretary at the Foreign Office at the time, Gunter Pleuger.
At a second all-day televised hearing on 25 April 2005, Fischer admitted that mistakes had been made during his time in office when thousands of visas to Germany were granted to criminals and prostitutes from Ukraine from 2000 to 2002.
[6] But Fischer also dismissed opposition arguments that the security and well-being of Germany were significantly harmed by the influx of immigrants, and he contended that once the problem was discovered in 2002 the policy was immediately corrected.
[7] Fischer's decision to admit some responsibility came after weeks of stonewalling by his party, which had even tried to delay appearing before the special parliamentary commission.
Some ministers, who were due to appear before the commission (e.g. Otto Schily or others Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the Federal Chancellory), were not to be questioned in the end.
On 15 June 2005, in a provisional ruling, the Constitutional Court considered the end of the hearings of evidence, as mentioned above on 2 June, as unconstitutional and ordered the Commission of Inquiry to continue with its timetable as planned as long as the Federal Diet isn't dissolved due to the expected call for a snap election later this summer.
On 4 August the European Commission decided that while the lax system at the heart of the German visa scandal violated European Union norms (including the Schengen Agreement and the Common Consular Instructions), Germany had since remedied the problem with a reformed policy that complies with EU rules.
