East Germans freer than Britons - academic

HAY-ON-WYE, Wales (Reuters) - Two decades after the velvet revolutions that ended communism in central Europe, east Germans are in some ways freer than Britons, a leading academic said on Sunday.

Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford University, said that in matters of privacy and surveillance by the state, eastern Germans, who in 1989 lived in a communist dictatorship, today enjoyed greater liberty than Britons.

"People have to fight back on that front and on others to claw back some of the freedoms we have lost," Garton Ash, who has written a book based on his file held by the former East Germany's Stasi secret police, told an audience at the Hay Festival.

Britain needed a written constitution and real separation of powers between the executive, judiciary and legislature, he said. This required "some form of extra-parliamentary mobilisation to bring our leaders to introduce this essential constitutional reform".

Garton Ash, who witnessed central Europe's revolutions first-hand, said 1989 ushered in a new model of largely bloodless revolution, based on peaceful negotiation leading to compromise.