Resistance No Surprise
Source: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung http://www.faz.net, November 24th 2000
Resistance No Surprise
Stefan Dietrich
Germany’s interior ministers are cruising at full speed toward a decision restricting the free right of assembly.
The tailwind of general indignation over neo-Nazi activities was whipped into a storm by strong words from Chancellor Gerhard Schröder along the lines of, “We won’t tolerate that any more!” Interior ministers, who are in charge of maintaining public order in Germany and like to be seen as men of action, took the public pressure for action against right-wing extremism as a request for a determined response. Now they are surprised to be meeting resistance.
But surely they should have foreseen that a hallowed democratic value like the constitutionally guaranteed right of assembly would have to be handled with care. Article 8 of the German Constitution may expressly permit legal restrictions on outdoor meetings, but if the aim is to completely ban disagreeable contemporaries from “places of outstanding historical importance” then the democratic baby is being thrown out along with the bathwater.
The idea that anti-democratic forces can coerce us into restricting democracy has turned the tailwind into a headwind that will give Otto Schilly’s legislative plans a good buffeting.
Source: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, http://www.faz.net, November 24th 2000
Ministers Agree to Ban Protests at Sensitive Sites
By Peter Schilder
BONN. Germany’s interior ministers unanimously voted on Friday to seek restrictions on the right to protest near certain national monuments and historically significant sites, despite warnings that any such law could be ruled unconstitutional.
The federal interior minister, Otto Schily, was asked by his 16 state counterparts, meeting in the former capital of West Germany, to find a way to make such restrictions acceptable to the Federal Constitutional Court and to prepare legislation for approval by the German parliament.
But a prominent civil rights lawyer joined some critical politicians in saying that it was difficult to see how legislation aimed at keeping demonstrators away from certain high-profile or sensitive locations could be made compatible with constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly.
“I’m skeptical whether such regulations would be approved by the Federal Constitutional Court,” said the lawyer, Jörg Lücke of Mainz.
The interior ministers said the restriction on demonstrations, while in some ways regrettable, was required as part of Germany’s effort to battle right-wing extremism. They said they wanted to tackle such activity “preventively” and “on a nation-wide basis.”
The decision came on the eve of another planned demonstration by the right-wing extremist National Democratic Party in central Berlin — the second in three weeks.
Some of the interior ministers have expressed frustration and anger that television and newspaper pictures of neo-Nazis marching past the Brandenburg Gate are often transmitted abroad, damaging Germany’s image.
But while the interior ministers — all of them Social Democrats or from the Christian Democratic Union or the Christian Social Union — supported the decision, the governing Social Democrats’ junior coalition partner said it was a dangerous and wrongheaded move. Cem Ozdemir, the domestic policy spokesman for Alliance 90_The Greens, said the measure “would not impress neo-Nazis, only weaken the civil rights of everyone else.”
The German justice minister, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, disagreed. The law already allows protest marches to be banned “when it can be assumed that there will be criminal acts,” the Social Democrat told a Potsdam newspaper.
The interior ministers also agreed to set up a national data base, similar to one that already exists for soccer hooligans, to keep data on individuals suspected of “right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic crimes.”
In an unrelated matter, the interior ministers decided to allow some Bosnian refugees threatened with expulsion to stay in Germany for two more years if they arrived before Dec. 15, 1995 and had been traumatized by violence in their homeland.
Source: YAHOO! Asia News, November 25th 2000, BERLIN (AFP) -
Police and Opponents Mobilise as German neo-Nazis
March in Berlin
Police were on the alert and counter-demonstrators mobilised as more than 1,000 supporters of a neo-Nazi party that the German government wants banned demonstrated in central Berlin on Saturday.
Shortly before the scheduled midday (1100 GMT) start of the march by the National Democratic Party (NPD), police reported one NPD member wounded and hospitalised after a scuffle with leftwingers.
Some 4,000 police officers were standing by to prevent further violence at the demonstration by the NPD, which had announced the participation of 1,500 of its members from all over the country.
A counter-demonstration was also being held by an alliance called “Europe without Racism”. Police put the number of NPD supporters at 1,100 and the number of counter-demonstrators at 900.
Under an agreement with the Berlin authorities, who have done their best to hinder the neo-Nazis’ demonstration, the NPD was not marching through the Brandenburg Gate, a symbol of German national unity.
Instead, its supporters were scheduled to go from a main rail station in east Berlin via the large Alexanderplatz to the busy shopping area of Friedrichstrasse.
The authorities want to prevent extremist groups such as the NPD from demonstrating at politically-sensitive sites, but the NPD was still expected to pass via a prominent war memorial, the so-called “Neue Wache”.
The counter-demonstration was held nearby in front of Berlin’s city hall and was due to be addressed by the speaker of the German parliament, Wolfgang Thierse.
Both the centre-left government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, have resolved to formally ask the Constitutional Court to outlaw the NPD.
The party, said to have a total membership of about 6,000, is accused of fomenting a wave of racist violence against foreigners and other minorities which has alarmed mainstream political leaders.
But the wisdom of according such importance to neo-Nazi groups has been questioned.
Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen defended on Saturday the decision of his Christian Democrats not to take part in the counter-demonstration.
He described the systematic organization of such protests as “an attempt to make the left respectable and disavow the political centre” and said the CDU would “not go along with that”.
But the head of the German police trade union (GdP), Konrad Freiberg, was quoted Saturday as calling on the central government to produce an annual report on the extent of rightwing extremism.
The situation is “very much worse” than criminal statistics suggest, he told the Osnabruecker Zeitung, saying that the extreme right-wing background to many offences was often not stated.
Freiberg called for the development of “a strategy of repression and prevention”. Alongside restrictions on demonstrations in certain areas, he said, a clear legal basis was needed on which to ban demonstrations.
He said the police could not continue to request the banning of rightwing demonstrations only to have such requests “systematically refused by the courts”.
According to police figures, there were 11,000 extreme rightwing criminal offences in Germany in the first 10 months of the year.
There has also been an outpouring of indignation in the last two days over the case of a six-year-old boy, the son of an Iraqi father and German mother, allegedly murdered in a crowded swimming pool by racist neo-Nazis.
