(AKI) - Germany's interior minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble is seeking controversial changes to the constitution that would allow the military to shoot down terrorist controlled aircraft. Schaeuble, a member of Germany's conservative Christian Democratic Union, was quoted by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung on Tuesday as saying such an amendment would create a so-called "de facto defence situation," enabling the prevention of attacks like the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United Nations that killed close to 3,000.
The plan, which comes less than a year after Germany's top court ruled on 15 February 2006 that a law allowing the destruction of terrorist-controlled planes was unconstitutional, has come in for harsh criticism from politicians across the political spectrum. In last February's ruling, judges said the lives of innocent plane passengers could not be weighed against those of people on the ground.
"Schaeuble is trying to side-step the constitutional court," Volker Beck of the opposition Greens party told the online newspaper Netzeitung, adding that German parliamentarians should not grant a "license to kill."
Dieter Wiefelspuetz, an interior policy expert for Schaeble's coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party, cited by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, also termed the interior minister's plan "unacceptable." Only if national security is threatened could the sacrificing of innocent lives be countenanced, he said. 
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