In Germany, dozens of people are in 'preventive detention' because they might otherwise engage in climate protests
Kees van der Leun (@Sustainable2050@mastodon.energy)
'Innocent until deemed inconvenient.'
This is legal Germany?
Bavaria doesn't even pretend to care anymore.
Kind of. Iirc it's a very controversial practice and whenever the police pulls it out in a public case it gets protested again (for good reason). Also, even if the practice is legal right now, there's a lot of limitations to it. Obviously it's nudging the ethical boundaries of police work either way.
Maybe they should arrest everyone that might protest against this before they arrest the other people that might protest against climate change. But then people might protest against that too. I guess everyone is under arrest! You're all under arrest. Get in the hole!
I can't read German, but we have a similar legal system in the Netherlands.
Most likely, these people committed some crime during a previous protest, such as illegally entering private property or vandalism. Often they will get sentences that are conditional.
If there is evidence to believe they are conspiring to commit a similar illegal act, then the conditional part of the sentence gets triggered.
There is a law that lets the police take people into custody to prevent terror attacks, but that’s not the case here.
Complaints have been lodged before, but hitherto dismissed. And final clarity on the legality of the procedure is still pending.
It helps to read the article.
but that's not the case here
But this is in fact how the police argues. Climate protests are terror attacks (since they disrupt traffic) and therefore this is justified.
Pretty sure the Bundesverfassungsgericht (basically our supreme court) will shut this practice down – just like all the other times Bavarian laws have been ruled unconstitutional – but Bavaria doesn't care. They scrap the law and replace it with a similar unconstitutional version and wait 2 years until the Bundesverfassungsgericht rules it unconstitutional and so on.
What the fuck
Germany is not alright and Bavaria is the least alright , nominally leftist parties barely get up to 10% in elections there so yeah was to be expected.
But yeah.
Additional Context: The state government of Bavaria (and several others around that same period, with similar ideas) passed a controversial reform of police laws in 2017-2018 (It was polemically called "The strictest police law since 1945").
It included changes such as:
As well as making previous restrictions such as on "probable danger" way more lax.
Preventative Detention
Political prisoners
English translation (from Google Translate):
Last generation: 27 climate demonstrators in Bavaria were preventively imprisoned
In the run-up to the IAA motor show, the police in Bavaria took activists from the last generation into so-called preventative detention. The procedure is very controversial.
By Kai Biermann
September 2, 2023, 4:14 pm
According to Last Generation, Bavarian authorities have currently put a total of 27 supporters of the group in prison without trial or verdict. This means that the number of activists in preventive detention has almost doubled, the group writes in a statement. They are therefore being held in the Stadelheim and Memmingen correctional facilities.
A large number of them were apparently taken into custody in connection with the IAA International Motor Show, which is scheduled to take place in Munich from September 5th to 10th. The last generation had announced protests against the fair. According to Last Generation, at least 16 of those affected are in custody until September 10th.
Eleven more are expected to serve longer sentences. According to Munich police, ten of them were taken into custody during a blockade on Friday. The Munich district court then ordered that they remain in prison until September 30th.
Nowhere as long as in Bavaria
Legally, this police approach is called preventive detention because it is not detention for a crime that has been committed. The police laws of the different states allow this for different lengths of time. In Bavaria, up to one month in prison is permitted, which may be extended by a judge for a maximum of another month. In other federal states, however, it is usually only a few days.
The so-called preventive or preventive detention is very controversial. The relevant laws were originally created to prevent terrorists from carrying out attacks. However, this form of detention is now also permitted in the case of the “imminent commission or continuation of an administrative offense of considerable importance for the general public,” as the Bavarian police law states. Lawsuits against this have so far been rejected in Bavaria. However, a final clarification about the legality of this approach is still pending.
This form of deprivation of liberty is all the more problematic because the protesters will not face imprisonment if they are convicted for a blockade. The corresponding procedures regularly only end with fines.
Carla Rochel, the spokesperson for the Last Generation, writes in the statement: "The question we as a society have to ask ourselves at this moment is: Do we think it's okay that protest for all of our basic right to life means prison instead of climate protection is answered?"
Thank you for the translation. This is exactly why people need to be wary of tools used against bad actors, that will then be used against everyone. A tool in the toolbox will be used by the police. Slippery slope is real. Once you establish precedent the tool is useful, you'll see it again.
It's not a slippery slope fallacy, if the slope is actually slippery.
Bad actors are everywhere and are especially drawn to positions of power (normal people see life-changing power over others as a major responsability, hence a burden).
This is why you limit power concentration on any single individual or organisation, have checks-and-balances on power and have higher demands of transparency and reporting one those with power than on run-of-the-mill citizens.
Of course the assholes drawn to power will do everything they can to subvert, nullify, remove or bypass those mechanisms and the reasons why we see right here in how these people (never forget, organisations are not sentient: it's always people making decisions) because they could choose to use these kind of laws that break the spirit of the Rule Of Law in democracies - which we were told were for use against terrorists (a very specific type of mass murder) - against demonstrators who have not even committed an actual crime and whose history indicated that the biggest crime the would ever commit would be mild property damage, something nowhere near the range of actual murder, much less mass murder.
In Canada I'm very wary of the current trial against the leaders of the Freedom Convoy for this reason. Popular sentiment at the time of their protest was that they were bad for blocking the road, and what comes from this trial could set precedent that could be used to criminalize climate and social justice protests in the future.
Oh, look those of us that were pointing out the risk of abuse of all those high-overreach laws passed in the aftermath of 9/11 during peak "terrorist scare" (even though more people died from falling in their bathtubs than from terrorist attacks) are once again proven right.
What! A! Surprise!
And also the other half
Death to amerikkka
Half of the voting population. Less people actually agree with conservatives in the US than our voting splits indicate. They are either indifferent or have been suppressed from voting.
The other half thinks the protestors should get the electric chair.
That's not even a little fun tbh
They want protestors to be quiet and in the distance. God forbid they inconvenience people to get their voices heard
As much as Germany denies it, it has been proven in the last 10 or so years that they really loved their nazi days. France seems to also love having been under nazi occupation too, and they seem to have a similar anti-environmentalist attitude.
When did Anti-environmentalist tomfoolery become pro-Nazi?
It's not the cause, it's the tactics. Throwing people in jail before they actually do anything is a classic hallmark of tyranny.
I mean, Nazis have a consistent record of being everything anti human and good personified. Capitalists want oil production to continue, they'll fund fascists to be their force to ensure it goes uninterrupted
"Become"? No. It just has been for lone one of their indicative "modern" traits.
More pro-fascism
hmmm this reminds me of something i just cant quite remember
Did i leave the oven on?
Yeah, but there's a solution for that.
Ohh, I've seen this one before, it's a classic!
Oktoberfest! Those days were a real gas!
This is the worst thing i've ever said online.
To be fair, in this case 16 people are already free since yesterday. The other 9 have been taken into custody while demonstrating. Not because of the demonstrating itself, but for various reasons, ranging from resistance against the police to cases where they technically endangered someones live by blocking emergency vehicles. They will be in jail for another 19 days. Another reason for longer jail sentences are them being impossible to learn, aka. not changing behaviour from previous incidents.
"the free world"
The planet is being cooked by oil companies benefitting from your tax dollars and you're thrown in jail for disagreeing with it...
but then they want to lecture you about "freedom" when you mention regulating pollution in any capacity.
First they came for the environmentalists, and I said nothing because I didn't want my commute to be inconvenienced...
I work with people who actually think that’s a good thing. I really fucking hate my coworkers.
Damn...I hate your coworkers too!
What does this have to do with technology?
OP may have posted it to this mag instead of another one by mistake
It's minority report but crappier.
Real "Innocence proves nothing" hours
Did Nazi that coming
in bad authoritarian soviet gommulist china,
Ah cool just like my favorite Phillip K Dick story
Ohh, I've seen this one, it's a classic!
Is this like Minority-Report-type shit?
The Germans have a history of these things, they try to pretend it's all in the past but here they are right back to their old ways. It's unacceptable for anyone to be detained in this way, period.
Yeah, us evil, evil Germans ... lol
Please educate yourself: There are rightwing tendencies even in your country, but they're coloured differently.
If you'd take a closer look at world politics you'd find that there is an alarming trend concerning exactly this.
Best example would be Italy - they've just elected a right-wing party and all hells breaking loose as they've started restructuring the social security system over there, leaving many, many families moneyless. Without any warning in advance. And that's just the start.
China is still on with their genocide - the Uigur must die it seems, no matter what. There's still concentration camps.
I could go on for hours.
But yeah. You're right. Us Germans are notorious and blind towards our history.
It’s absolutely better to let people be free and do whatever they want, than to apprehend them ahead of time when they’re suspected of planning to carry out a crime.
Just imagine if the people who carried out the 11th September attack had been caught in the planning stage? Then tomorrow would just be a normal day instead of a sad day of remembrance.
That would’ve been outrageous!
Hahaha and people look at them as if they're a country to be emulated
I'd like to know how that's even remotely compliant with the ECHR???
Put there by the really same government you should trust for nuclear power
Some European tell me again why you believe you have free speech.
Is disrupting traffic by glueing yourself to the road covered by the first ammendment in the US?
No, but we have this thing called the 6th amendment that lays out the minimum requirements for prosecution. (known as due process). Pre-crime clearly breaks those minimums.
« Va bien te faire foutre »
Done
I find it funny, you talk about freedom, Europeans will defend their governments as free, shit on the US, defend government power in the name of protecting the public, but then, preemptively jailing people, like previous authoritarian states of Europe would do, and they're all surprised pikachu face. I doubt they'll ever get it, Europeans are lemmings.
Except the French. The French light shit on fire when their government displeases them.
This is generalising a bit much done you think? This is like saying all US states are the same, but more outrageous as they're completely separate countries with different cultures, languages, and governments
well, you have a history of authoritarianism and warrantless detention in many, many European countries, the US is all entirely subject to the US constitution which explicitly forbids warrantless searches, detention absent due process and things like that. It has a few blind spots, and the rules are broken, but generally can be corrected and the culprits prosecuted. Detention in Germany for example without a jury trial and evidence of illegal activity is perfectly legal, as it is in the UK and almost every other European country so long as it protects the general welfare or some other such broad meaningless condition.
Are those so called "climate protestors" the losers blocking public roads?
Yup, they glue themselves to the streets, blocking the traffic.
This is specifically Bavaria. They also recently found out that their vice president has a past as a Nazi and the reaction of their president was essentially "Oh no. Anyway...". So, yeah, if you considered visiting the Oktoberfest, maybe reconsider.
DEUTSCHLAND 😎💪🏿💪🏿💪🏿
what is not going to Oktoberfest gonna do?
being out of reach of nazis or conservative christians can increase safety and well-being
Eh, I don't expect random tourists to be locked up by the fascists, nor do I necessarily expect the not-quite-fascists to distance themselves from the fascists, just from losses in the tourism industry.
I'm mostly just saying, there's tons of places you could be traveling to and "drinking beer with fascists" isn't quite as attractive anymore.
Hurt the bavarian economy.