In a recent interview, the co-leader of the Left Party, Jan van Aken, acknowledged that he secretly handed over confidential documents related to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to Greenpeace in 2016. “I gave it to an old friend of Greenpeace and said, ‘Do with it what you want,'” van Aken said in an interview with the video format “Spitzengespräch” of the German newspaper, Der Spiegel.
The incident, he added, is now considered to be a matter of the past. Van Aken recalled that the main issue at the time was the secrecy surrounding the negotiations. “Eventually, the public pressure became so great that the German government said that members of the Bundestag could take a look at the texts” he explained.
During the TTIP negotiations, the black-red government under Angela Merkel (CDU) had allowed members of the Bundestag to review the documents in a reading room at the Ministry of Economics.
Van Aken said that he almost fell off his chair while going through the documents. “All labor and consumer protection standards were supposed to be lowered, and the industry was supposed to gain more rights against workers. It’s a question of whether one breaks a rule or not” he said.
He entered the reading room with a hidden camera and filmed the screen displaying the documents.