Not many, granted, but there still appear to be a few left. In this case high court judges.
I wish I could say that about the Banana Republic.
Berlin rent cap oveerturned by Germany’s top court – Germany’s constitutional court has decided that the Berlin rent cap violates Germany’s constitution. The cap was one of the most-debated laws in the country.
Are the previous court decisions ruling that the European Court of Justice can have primacy over national law in Germany. It’s also “incomprehensible” that it took so long for everybody to figure this out. I sure hope that this latest ruling won’t be ruled out as “meaningless” later but I’ve had my hopes dashed before.
Germany’s constitutional court sent shockwaves through Europe last week by ruling that the German government and the EU’s top judges failed to properly scrutinise the European Central Bank’s bond-buying programme.
The judgment threatens to turn the European Commission against Germany, the EU’s biggest member state. It raises doubts over the primacy of the European Court of Justice over national law. It also risks driving a wedge between the ECB and its biggest shareholder, the Bundesbank.
Germany’s highest court dismissed an earlier ECJ ruling in ECB’s favour as “incomprehensible” and “meaningless”. That bombshell decision opened the door to potential legal challenges against the EU from other countries, such as Poland and Hungary, whose authoritarian governments are already at odds with Brussels.
That means tomcat. But it also means hangover.
And here you thought that the courts of the country you live in made wacky court decisions (and they do).
A German court has ruled that hangovers are an “illness”, in a timely judgement days after the annual Oktoberfest beer festival began in Munich.
The case landed before judges in Frankfurt when plaintiffs claimed a firm offering anti-hangover “shots” and drink powders to mix with water was making illegal health claims.
“Information about a food product cannot ascribe any properties for preventing, treating or healing a human illness or give the impression of such a property,” the sober ruling from the superior regional court on Monday said.
Ein Alkoholkater ist eine Krankheit. Hersteller von Nahrungsergänzungsmitteln dürfen daher nicht damit werben, dass ihr Produkt gegen den Kater hilft oder ihm vorbeugt, wie das Oberlandesgericht (OLG) Frankfurt am Main in einem am Montag veröffentlichten Urteil entschied.
That means order must prevail. And prevail it does in Germany, sort of.
This stuff just keeps getting weirder. The recent deportation of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and suspected jihadist Sami A. to Tunesia has now been ruled illegal because a last minute fax blocking the decision to deport him was received only after the plane carrying him off to Tunesia had already taken off and this led a higher German court to now order him to be brought back to Germany where he will eventually be deported back to Tunesia again but only after this orderly German deportation process has been carried out in a thoroughly orderly German fashion. I feel like I’m in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest here sometimes, people.
A higher court in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia has ordered the city of Bochum to bring back Sami A., a suspected former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, who was deported to his native Tunisia last month.
Bochum can appeal the decision in Germany’s top constitutional court in Karlsruhe. But an appeal is not likely to delay the return of the suspect.
Maybe the Tunisians might come through here, though. They are bound to be a little more advanced in matters of jurisprudence.
“The process here in Tunisia is still ongoing, so he has no ID to travel with.”
The state court in Berlin convicted a group of young refugees from Syria and Libya on Tuesday who attempted to set fire to a sleeping homeless man at a subway station on Christmas last year. The oldest of the group, a 21-year-old Syrian man, was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison.
I guess the judges were being lenient like in that recent case in Cottbus. In Muslim countries it’s apparently OK to light people on fire so that needed to be taken into consideration, I assume.
But seriously, if were up to me and I were a judge here in Berlin I’d lock them up in the David Hasselhoff Museum and throw away the key.
“Veiled searches” probably aren’t what you think they are. Women wearing veils aren’t randomly being searched here (although the idea isn’t half bad).
It means stop and search practices or dragnet controls – searches made without having a concrete suspicion.
Bavaria is pushing hard for more of these at the moment, all over the country. Federal minister of the interior Thomas de Maizière is all for it, too. And the usual cry of outrage hält sich in Grenzen (is being kept within bounds, within the border). Maybe because this is a country that thinks it doesn’t need to have a border?
Diese verdachtsunabhängigen Polizeikontrollen sind bislang auf einen 30-Kilometer-Gürtel hinter den Bundesgrenzen beschränkt, sollten laut Herrmann aber auch in der Nähe von Flughäfen, Bahnhöfen und Rastplätzen möglich sein.
PS: Not that stop and search would do any good here in Germany anyway. The courts here don’t cooperate. Check out the judgement reached be a court in Cottbus last week: A Muslim asylum seeker stabs his wife 19 times, cuts her throat and throws her out the window because he thinks she’s been sleeping around (the mother of his five children). He gets off with manslaughter. That means he’ll be out in half the time he would be out in if convicted of murder (there is no life sentence in Germany). The court’s reasoning? In the Muslim world it’s apparently OK to kill your wife if she commits adultery so the man had to be judged with a different set of standards. He gets a discount, in other words. For being a Muslim. This was a court in Germany. Today. Coming to your town soon.
But at least the politicians (SPD) who introduced it can claim to have done something in reaction to the infamous New Year’s Eve attacks. No one has been sentenced for any of these attacks, by the way. Just so you get where I’m coming from.
Introducing new legislation like this doesn’t solve the problem unless the laws are actually enforced. It’s a mentality thing. Judges here in Germany, like judges in another country many of you are familiar with, are simply much too lenient when it comes to their interpretation of the law and their sentencing. They will be just as lenient with the new law as they were with the old one. But boy oh boy is this new law ever strict or something. “No” actually means “no” now. As if it had meant something else before.
The wave of attacks on New Year’s Eve in Cologne shocked Germans, though prosecutions have been minimal and many were aghast to learn that, once again, assault could only be proven under German law if the victim resisted. On Thursday, a 21-year-old Iraqi and an Algerian of 26 became the first men to be convicted of sexual assault when a Cologne court gave them suspended one-year sentences.
“We urge the Jewish community in Germany and circumcisers to continue to perform circumcisions and not to wait for a change in the law.”
A German court’s ban on circumcising baby boys has provoked a rare show of unity between Jews, Muslims and Christians who see it as a threat to religious freedom, while doctors warn it could increase health risks by forcing the practice underground.
Die Positionen zur Beschneidung waren bei Anne Will unversöhnlich, am härtesten stritten ein Rabbiner und ein Strafrechtler.
Observing Hermann 