Article 1 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Article 1 of the German Constitution guarantees the inviolability of human dignity and the obligation of public authorities to the other fundamental rights (Articles 1 to 19) of the German Constitution. Just like Article 20 of the Basic Law , Article 1 is also protected by the eternity clause formulated in Article 79 and must therefore neither be abolished nor changed in terms of content by the constitution-amending legislature.

Article 1 of the Basic Law - a work by Dani Karavan on the glass panes on the Spree side at the Jakob-Kaiser-Haus of the Bundestag in Berlin

text

(1) Human dignity is inviolable. It is the duty of all state authorities to respect and protect them.

(2) The German people are therefore committed to inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every human community, of peace and justice in the world.

(3) The following fundamental rights bind legislation, executive power and case law as directly applicable law.

Explanations of the individual paragraphs

Paragraph 1

The dignity of man is the supreme constitutional principle, therefore all state violence has to act with at that. It is therefore the benchmark for the legislative , executive and judicial branches . The state must refrain from anything that could impair human dignity. In the interpretation of the article it is controversial whether human dignity is to be understood as an over-positive law ( natural law ) or whether it has to be considered a positive law . The discussion about the scope of the inviolability of human dignity includes embryo protection and the prohibition of torture . Other topics include the question of the extent to which possible violations of human dignity should be taken into account during deportations , whether eavesdropping attacks are compatible with them, and to what extent criminal proceedings may conflict with respect for human dignity.

Paragraph 2

Like the first paragraph and a large part of the German Basic Law , this paragraph is also a reaction to the inhuman events of the Second World War , with the ethically and morally fundamental ulterior motive that these should never be repeated. That is why human rights are integrated into the Basic Law, similar to international law in Art. 25 .

Paragraph 3

In contrast to the Weimar Constitution , for example , which only contained program sentences, the basic rights enshrined in the Basic Law bind the legislature, the executive and the judiciary as directly applicable law. This means that the fundamental rights establish legal claims of the individual against the state. Interventions in basic rights that do not provide for basic rights themselves and that do not result from other constitutional values ​​are therefore not permitted. Citizens can sue on the basis of fundamental rights. If the citizen is of the opinion after exhaustion of the legal process that there is still a violation of fundamental rights, he can appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court by way of a constitutional complaint .

See also

literature

Comments
Specialist literature
  • Christoph Enders: Human dignity in the constitutional order: to the dogmatics of Art. 1 GG . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1997, ISBN 978-3-16-146813-1

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Gutmann : Structure and function of human dignity as a legal term Preprints of the Center for Advanced Study in Bioethics, Münster 2010/7
  2. ^ Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde : Human dignity was inviolable. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 3, 2003, No. 204, p. 33. May 23, 2019, accessed on May 23, 2019 .
  3. ^ Heiner Bielefeldt : The prohibition of torture in the rule of law , Policy Paper No. 4, German Institute for Human Rights , Berlin, June 2004.
  4. ^ Christoph Gusy : Human dignity and criminal proceedings