Germany's Defense Ministry has clarified that men of military age do not, after all, need to obtain permission for trips abroad, but in doing so it may have broken the law. That is the conclusion of a legal opinion drawn up by the Research Services of the Bundestag, which was made available to the news agency AFP on Monday.
While the ministry is allowed under the Military Service Act to grant exceptions to the obligation to register travel, the assessment finds that its blanket order effectively wiped out a statutory rule in its entirety.
The controversy flared over the Easter weekend, when public attention landed on a clause in the new military service legislation requiring men of fighting age to seek approval before taking longer journeys abroad. Within days, the ministry responded with a general order, known in German law as an Allgemeinverfügung, declaring that no such approval would be needed for as long as military service remains voluntary.
The Research Services question whether the ministry stayed within the bounds of its authority. In their reading, the power to set aside a law, or any part of it, belongs to one institution alone. They write that this possibility rests solely with the judiciary acting under its constitutional jurisdiction. Put plainly, only the Federal Constitutional Court has the right to annul a statute or portions of it.
The opinion stresses a basic principle of how carve-outs are supposed to work: if a law allows for exceptions, there must still be situations in which the law continues to apply. Otherwise, the authors note, the exception would simply become the standard case. Yet the ministry's order lifts the approval requirement for every man it could possibly cover, leaving no one still bound by it.
That sweeping reach, the assessment argues, would mean the approval requirement is suspended entirely, since no addressee remains subject to it. The ministry, as part of the executive branch, has no mandate to go that far. Its proper role, the Research Services emphasise, is to apply and enforce the laws that parliament has passed, not to neutralise them.
On the strength of this reasoning, the Research Services conclude that the general order issued on 9 April 2026 should be regarded as unlawful. The opinion sets out two possible routes to undoing it: the ministry could withdraw the order itself, or a court could declare it invalid. The ARD capital studio was the first outlet to report on the assessment.
For the Left party's deputy parliamentary leader, Desiree Becker, the episode amounts to fresh evidence of incompetence and what she branded a maximum failure at ministerial level. Defence Minister Boris Pistorius of the Social Democrats, she charged, was plainly overstepping his remit and chipping away at the separation of powers.
The defence department, for its part, said on Monday that the general order was intended only as a transitional arrangement, bridging the gap until a change in the law takes effect. The accompanying legislation is expected to be adopted before the end of the year.
The flashpoint sits within a wider reform of military service that came into force on 1 January. The package revives the registration of those eligible for service and introduces a compulsory medical assessment for 18-year-old men, while women may undergo the assessment on a voluntary basis. The stated aim is to expand the size of the armed forces.
The law as passed stops short of restoring the general conscription that has been suspended since 2011. It does, however, open the door to a so-called needs-based conscription, to be triggered if the target troop levels cannot be reached through the voluntary model alone.
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