In 1993, the SPD nominated Däubler-Gmelin to fill the vacancy of vice-president of the Federal Constitutional Court, but after conservative parliamentary groups blocked the nomination for nine months as being "too political" she abandoned this career step in favor of Jutta Limbach. Ahead of the 1994 elections, SPD chairman Rudolf Scharping included her in his shadow cabinet for the party’s campaign to unseat incumbent Helmut Kohl as Chancellor.[1] During the campaign, Däubler-Gmelin served as shadow minister of justice.
Federal Minister of Justice, 1998–2002
From 1998 to 2002, Däubler-Gmelin served as Justice Minister in Gerhard Schröder's first cabinet, where she oversaw a number of controversial reform projects such as the reform of German citizenship legislation, the introduction of same-sex civil unions, and the overhaul of the German Civil Code, the most invasive since its inception in 1900.[citation needed]
In 1999, both Däubler-Gmelin and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer appealed for clemency for the LaGrand brothers, two German citizens sentenced to death in Arizona. According to the German government, the LaGrands had been denied their rights as German citizens because prosecutors did not inform the German consulate of the brothers' arrest in 1982 until a decade later. However, both were put to death in a cloud of cyanide gas.[2]
Amid the Enron scandal in 2002, Däubler-Gmelin launched a voluntary 12-page corporate governance code that calls on company audit committees to be aware of other business links between the company and its auditors, including consulting work.[3]
On 18 September 2002, four days before Schröder's re-election, she attended a meeting at a restaurant in Derendingen (near Tübingen) with about 30 trade unionists from two local factories (the topic was "Globalization and Labor").[4] Däubler-Gmelin, who has long been known for her outspokenness,[5] later said she had been unaware that a reporter from local newspaper Schwäbisches Tagblatt was present, insisting that she regarded the event as an internal meeting.[4] After discussion had turned to the Iraq crisis, she remarked that U.S. president Bush was preparing a war to detract from domestic problems such as the economic crisis at the time, and that this was a popular political strategy which had already been used by Adolf Hitler.[4] When some participants showed disagreement, she added immediately that this was not meant to liken Bush to Hitler as a person, but rather to compare their methods, and that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher had also used the 1982 Falklands War to improve election prospects.[4] She also described the U.S. legal system as "lousy".[4]
This was the version published by Schwäbisches Tagblatt (a paper widely regarded as liberal to leftist and respected for its journalistic quality), which later stated that Däubler-Gmelin herself had confirmed the wording of the report,[5][6] as well as several present at the meeting.[5][6] Another account of the meeting states that the Hitler comparison originated from a participant and that Däubler-Gmelin had merely agreed that Hitler had used such tactics, too.[7]
Immediately after the article had been published, Däubler-Gmelin strongly denied it, claiming to have been misquoted.[8] She also announced that she would sue the Schwäbische Tagblatt, but later chose not to do so. She encountered criticism for allegedly expressing anti-americanism in both Germany and abroad, including members of the U.S. government such as Ari Fleischer and Condoleezza Rice.[9] On September 20, Däubler-Gmelin called U.S. Ambassador Dan Coats to state that the reports had no basis and Schröder wrote an apology letter to Bush, stating "there is no place at my cabinet table for anyone who makes a connection between the American president and such a criminal."[9] He did not force her to resign immediately, claiming to trust her denial of the quotation, but she was dropped from his new cabinet when it was formed a few weeks after his narrow re-election.[citation needed]