In the late 1990s, the Foreign Ministry led by Fischer instructed diplomatic missions to show more liberalism in visa matters. In case of doubt, the consulate was to decide on the basis of the principle of freedom of movement. This cancelled the previous restrictive principle that required refusing applicants in case of doubt. The new consular practice immediately bore abundant fruit – annually, 250,000 more entry visas to Germany were issued than before. The peak load fell on four consulates – in Kiev, Moscow, Pristina, and Tirana.
Political opponents of the current German government from the Christian Democratic Party openly accuse Joschka Fischer, who indeed in recent years was obsessed with the idea of freedom of movement, of aiding human trafficking and even forced prostitution. No one can say how many entry visas to Germany were received by the 'brotherhood' from Eastern European countries. The most active human trafficking was on the Ukrainian route, and in Kiev the number of issued visas jumped from 133,420 in 1998 to 297,391 in 2001.
The consular indulgence for a time even allowed obtaining German visas without the previously mandatory guarantees of the inviting party. It was enough to obtain the so-called tourist insurance passport. The idea for this document belonged to the Swabian entrepreneur Heinz Kübler. His insurance company, for a certain fee, assumed guarantees for the tourist's stay in the country and, if necessary, paid the costs of his treatment or expulsion from the EU.
Such a passport could initially be purchased for 92 euros and only in Germany. Later, however, the service was brought close to the consumer, but the price then jumped to a thousand euros. Now Joschka Fischer's political opponents are trying to find out what role his former deputy, State Secretary Ludger Volmer, played in this story. The triumph of the principle of freedom of movement in the Foreign Ministry is attributed precisely to him. The press also wrote that Volmer could have been an intermediary between the entrepreneur Kübler and the printing house 'Bundesdruckerei,' where 170,000 'insurance passport' forms were printed.
The position of the critics of the current leadership of the Foreign Ministry is also reinforced by last year's court decision, which became the formal reason for proceedings first in parliamentary debates and now in the Bundestag investigative committee. The decision was issued following a trial in Cologne against Anatoly Barg, a Ukrainian who had received German citizenship. From August 2000 to May 2002, he managed to illegally transport about seven thousand of his former compatriots from Ukraine to Germany.
Judge Ulrich Heppner, who heard Barg's case, ruled in favor of freedom of movement for human goods and by his own authority saved the wholesale trader in Ukrainian prostitutes from prison. However, the judge issued a special ruling addressed to the German foreign policy department, which spoke of 'grave miscalculations' in the activities of the Foreign Ministry that allegedly contributed to violations of the law. Judge Heppner called the ministry's instruction on liberalizing visa rules a 'cold putsch against the existing legal order'.