Further talks or contact between OC officials and the German Consumers' Foundation (Stiftung Warentest) would serve no useful purpose, the 2006 FIFA World Cup Organising Committee Supervisory Board unanimously resolved at a meeting on 3 February 2006 in Neu-Isenburg chaired by Federal Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. "We are in no doubt as to the exceptionally high safety standards at our World Cup stadiums," commented Schäuble, the minister responsible for sport.

Schäuble based his statement on a resolution passed by the Buildings Inspection technical committee of the Conference of Planning Ministries. The minutes of a meeting held on 25 and 26 January 2006 in Nuremberg note a specific position taken in response to the Consumers' Foundation assertion that emergency evacuation in a panic situation should direct spectators to the stadium interior/pitch area, leading to a "deficient" verdict for the stadiums in Berlin, Gelsenkirchen and Leipzig.

"Evacuation routes must always lead spectators outside to public assembly areas. The safest place is out in the open, away from the building structure. Evacuation leading to the interior of the structure runs contrary to crowd safety objectives, as the interior of the structure cannot be guaranteed as free from danger," the technical committee resolution states. "Evacuation into stadium interiors is fundamentally at odds with planning regulations, and should only be deployed in exceptional circumstances, based on specific decisions taken by security authorities."

Evacuation routes, the minuted resolution continues, must be defined in such a way that structural circumstances neither promote nor prompt situations of mass panic. Furthermore, in critical situations, the stands must be accessible from the stadium interior/pitch area, so that assistance may be provided to potentially injured persons. According to the resolution: "This is the purpose of gates which can only be opened from the stadium interior. The Olympic Stadium in Berlin is equipped with mobile bridges for this purpose, permitting security personnel to cross the moat and access the terraced areas from the playing field if necessary. In 70 years of operations at the Olympic stadium, there is no recorded instance of a situation which might be termed 'mass panic'."

The committee specifically addressed the evidence submitted by the Consumers' Foundation. "The Foundation quotes findings of the new scientific branch known as 'panic research', but the Foundation does not appear to realise that the branch of science known as 'panic research' focuses on the causes and avoidance of panic, especially mass panic, and the management of panic situations. 'Panic research' thus rather belongs to the field of psychology than crowd management-oriented evacuation models."

Furthermore, the OC Supervisory Board is satisfied that the stadium in Kaiserslautern is in no way defective, as the Consumers' Foundation "deficient" verdict for the Fritz-Walter-Stadium was based on allegedly insufficient fire prevention equipment, despite the inspection taking place when the stand in question was still under construction.

"We have carefully reviewed all the available evidence and have arrived at the unanimous conclusion that further talks between the OC Presidential Committee and the Consumers' Foundation would serve no useful purpose. We have also taken into account that a high-ranking representative of the Consumers' Foundation has described the so-called 'Red cards' for four World Cup stadiums as an editorial stunt," the Interior Minister declared on behalf of the Supervisory Board, which met in plenary session last Friday with the exception of DFB Executive President Gerhard Mayer-Vorfelder, who was ill. Schäuble's predecessor Otto Schily was also present.