Working group for agricultural issues
The working group for agricultural issues , more precisely the working group for agricultural issues in the states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia eV (AfA) , is the organization and representation of interests of previous owners of predominantly agricultural and forestry real estate in the area of the former GDR . The office is based in Berlin.
She supported the Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights in connection with the ban on restitution for agricultural and forestry land confiscated between 1945 and 1949 during the so-called land and industrial reform, which was publicly owned by the GDR in 1990. She continues to advocate the concerns of the former owners vis-à-vis the government and parliament, in particular also for a criminal rehabilitation of the unjust measures taken at the time, and carries out public relations work.
aims
The aims of political work are the political and legal processing of injustice and disenfranchisement of the approx. 10,000 families affected by the communist “land reform”; a further improvement in the minimum reparation payments under the Compensation Act; the handling of compensation procedures at property offices; the return of works of art as well as a consolidation of reorganized agricultural and forestry family businesses and a consolidation of repurchased areas
Membership is open to all former owners of agricultural or forestry property in the area of the former GDR and their heirs.
Complaint to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)
According to legal experts, one of the former owners' complaints, which was largely prepared and submitted to the ECHR by the AfA, failed because the focus was not on the indisputable political persecution and blanket defamation of the victims of the land and industrial reform in the Soviet occupation zone, but because only a financial improvement of the services after the compensation was made - and Compensation Act (EALG) should be achieved. The (oral) chief negotiator of the FRG before the ECHR, Jochen Frowein , stated that there were "no legitimate expectations of the plaintiffs." Frowein also pointed out that “the injustice of political persecution would never be recognized by Germany because it violated the Vienna Convention . Those affected by political persecution would get everything back from Germany, there could be no doubt about that, ”said Frowein at the hearing before the Grand Chamber of the ECHR. Then came Frowein's decisive sentence: “But this is not our subject here!” (But this is not our subject here!).
organization
The majority of the members represent / represent communities of heirs. According to its own information, the AfA represents around 12,000 people who were victims of displacement and confiscations under the Soviet military administration in Germany, SMAD and the authorities of the former Soviet occupation zone between 1945 and 1949 .
The association is a member of the family businesses Land and Forest in Berlin. This is the umbrella organization of the agricultural and forestry landowners' associations - which have existed in each of the old federal states since the first post-war years - as well as the state associations newly founded in the new federal states after 1990.
Web links
literature
- Löhr, Hanns Christian: The struggle for public property: a study on the privatization of agriculture in the new federal states by the Treuhandanstalt (1990–1994). (= Contemporary historical research. Volume 13), Duncker and Humblot, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-428-10475-7 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ ECHR judgment v. Maltzan others vs. FRG ( Memento from May 30, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ a b Federal Association of German Farmers eV (VDL)