Bjorn Clemens

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Björn Clemens (born April 12, 1967 in Düsseldorf ) is a German publicist and lawyer working in the right-wing extremist environment. For many years he was also active in politics.

Professional background

Björn Clemens studied law in Marburg and Gießen . After passing the second state examination in law, he initially acted in Stuttgart as a parliamentary advisor to the Republican parliamentary group there. Since 2000 Clemens has been working as an independent lawyer with his own law firm in Düsseldorf. In 2003 he was appointed as a specialist lawyer for administrative law .

In 2005 Clemens received his doctorate with a thesis on “the concept of war of aggression and the function of its criminal liability”. Christian Hillgruber assessed the text as "less a legal dissertation than a polemical pamphlet". Nevertheless, the writing deserves credit: "To have again drawn attention to the difficulties of a definition of attack that meets the rule of law, and the questionable nature of the attempt to penalize the (which?) War." Thus, among other things, Clemens advocates “either adapting or abolishing” the term war of aggression in the Basic Law, the term codifying the “historical-political conception of Germany as a belligerent disruptor nation”.

In 2010 he defended the NPD functionary Udo Pastörs .

In summer 2012, he represented Norbert Weidner in his efforts to obtain an injunction against another member of his fraternity .

Since 2012 he has defended before the state security chamber of the LG Koblenz in the action office Mittelrhein -Prozess, which had developed into one of the most extensive processes in the German legal history and was closed in 2019 after three main proceedings. Clemens presented a request there in the form of a poem.

Since 2014 he has been a member of the board of the “ Society for Free Publication ” (GfP).

In 2015 he represented neo-Nazi activist Melanie Dittmer , organizer of Dügida, the Düsseldorf offshoot of Pegida , in the dispute against the city administration in the dispute over the right to demonstrate . In the right-wing extremist environment, Clemens is regarded as a so-called scene lawyer.

At the beginning of 2018 he was briefly a defender of the Thuringian neo-Nazi André Eminger, who was accused in the NSU trial .

He is one of the lawyers of neo-Nazi Markus H., who was accused of aiding and abetting in the murder of Walter Lübcke .

Political career

1993 to 2007: Membership in the Republicans party

Clemens, a fraternity member of the Rheinfranken , joined the Republican Party (REP) during his studies . In 1993 he founded the REP youth of the Hessian state association and represented the party in the district council of Gießen in the early 1990s. In Dusseldorf he ran in September 1999 in second place on the Dusseldorf REP list for city council, but failed to make it into the council because only one place could be filled. In 2002 Clemens was elected deputy federal chairman of the REP. In this role he became one of the most prominent critics of the incumbent REP federal chairman Rolf Schlierer . Schlierer wanted to transform the REP into a bourgeois right-wing conservative party and establish it as a potential coalition partner of the Union parties. Clemens criticized that this course had made the REP politically insignificant. In contrast to Schlierer, he advocated a return of the party to the work of party founder Franz Schönhuber , according to his own account . In particular, Clemens was considered the most important proponent of rapprochement between the party and the NPD . Clemens, for example, called for election agreements with the Germany Pact between the NPD and DVU . With this demand he ran against Schlierer at the REP federal party congress in November 2006, but did not find a majority and left the party he called the "death ship".

From 2007: Independent activist and publicist

After leaving the REP, Björn Clemens became an independent activist and publicist. He appears as a speaker at hall events and demonstrations of the entire right-wing populist to right-wing extremist spectrum in the Federal Republic, for example at the " Bürgerbewegung pro Köln ", the NPD , the DVU , the revisionist "Society for Free Journalism", for whose publications he also promotes, and the " Junge Landsmannschaft Ostdeutschland " (JLO). In February 2008, Clemens was one of the main speakers at the annual JLO funeral march on the occasion of the anniversary of the air raids on Dresden in World War II. In front of over 6000 participants he spoke under the motto “You could break our walls, but not our hearts”. Through his appearances at various parties and organizations, Clemens is now one of the few integration figures within the otherwise divided right-wing scene in the Federal Republic.

In September 2007, at the invitation of the “ Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty ” group, Clemens also took part in a meeting of German right-wing populists and right-wing extremists in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. At the meeting organized by the Austrian MEP Andreas Mölzer (FPÖ), the NPD federal chairman Udo Voigt , the DVU federal chairman Gerhard Frey and Clemens' former rival, REP boss Rolf Schlierer , were also present.

Already during his REP time, Clemens published sporadically articles, for example in the Burschenschaftliche Blätter , the weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit and the right-wing extremist monthly Nation und Europa . In the recent past Clemens increased his journalistic activities. In March 2008 he published the collection of poems Black Torch ; in his own words, it is a “cynical reckoning with the degeneracies of contemporary liberalism”. In addition, various contributions by him have appeared in anthologies, including “ Gesinnungsjustiz , Concept and Appearance” in the 2007 yearbook of the right-wing extremist society for free journalism and “Prussia in the light of constitutional and international law” in the Prussian signals published by the JLO .

In 2010, Clemens published a political-philosophical essay entitled "Evening Blueness - The Typology of the Zero Hour". The book is preceded by a foreword by Hans-Dietrich Sander . In his main work so far, Clemens presents the development of Germany since 1945 as a political and cultural decline. The cause is the system of the Federal Republic, which is characterized by liberalism and the “spirit of the hour zero ”, which should therefore be put to the test.

Private

After his membership became known and the protests that followed, Clemens resigned from the Düsseldorf carnival association “Narrencollegium” at the beginning of 2020.

Works

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Stephan Braun, Alexander Geisler, Martin Gerster: Strategies of the extreme right: Background analysis answers . VS Verlag, 2009, pp. 391-392.
  2. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 8, 2005, No. 234 / page 6: Symbolic. In: FAZ.net . October 8, 2005, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Fabian Virchow: Against civilism: international relations and the military in the political conceptions of the extreme right . VS Verlag, 2005, p. 272.
  4. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from May 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.publikative.org
  5. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sr-online.de
  6. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from September 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sr-online.de
  7. ↑ http://www.ndr.de/regional/mecklenburg-vorpommern/pastoers129.html ( Memento from July 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ http://www.wdr.de/mediathek/html/regional/2012/07/04/lokalzeit-bonn-burschenschaftler.xml
  9. ↑ dpa / il: Displeasure: Koblenz neo-Nazi trial dragged on. In: welt.de . November 13, 2014, accessed October 7, 2018 .
  10. ↑ https://www.belltower.news/lexikon/dittmer-melanie/
  11. ↑ https://www.bnr.de/category/stichworte/melanie-dittmer
  12. ↑ http://www.express.de/duesseldorf/rechtsstreit-um--duegida--geisels-widersacher-von-der-npd-gefeiert-3407362
  13. ^ Wiebke Ramm : NSU trial: new defense lawyer calls for an interruption. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 9, 2018.
  14. ^ Right-wing extremism: lawyer resigns from college of fools. January 14, 2020, accessed on July 6, 2020 (German).
personal data
SURNAME Clemens, Björn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 12, 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf