NPD prohibition proceedings (2001-2003)

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The then NPD chairman, Udo Voigt

On January 30, 2001, the Federal Government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder submitted an application to the Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) with the aim of establishing the unconstitutionality of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and thereby banning this party. On March 30, 2001, the Bundestag and Bundesrat followed suit with their own proposals for a ban.

The proceedings were discontinued by the Federal Constitutional Court on March 18, 2003 for procedural reasons because informers from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution were also active in the party's management level. The question of whether the NPD is an unconstitutional party was not examined.

initiative

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The prohibition procedure was largely the result of an initiative by the Bavarian Interior Minister Günther Beckstein , who called on the federal government in August 2000 to ban the NPD. A series of attacks with partly proven, partly suspected xenophobic background gave this initiative the decisive momentum. The bomb attack on July 27, 2000 on a group of Jewish immigrants from Russia played a special role . Although the act remained unresolved, it was concluded that there were xenophobic motives. In all parties, with the exception of the FDP, which feared that the application would fail, calls for a ban on the NPD were loud. The government spokesman Uwe-Karsten Heye ( SPD ) assumed that the findings would not be sufficient for an application for a ban, but when two Arabs carried out an attack on the New Synagogue in Düsseldorf , the federal government proclaimed an " uprising of the decent " and decided to initiate a prohibition procedure against the NPD at the Federal Constitutional Court.

Justification of the prohibition requests

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Exact legal evaluation according to Art. 21 II GG
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The motions for the prohibition were comprehensively justified by all three bodies entitled to apply (Bundestag, Federal Government and Bundesrat). A detailed analysis of these reasons raised doubts about the sense of this prohibition procedure from the outset: The evidence that was presented against the NPD and its officials was largely limited to accusations of anti-constitutional propaganda (especially sedition ). Serious crimes, in particular the use of force or their preparation, could only be specifically attributed to the party in a few cases.

V-man scandal

The prohibition procedure became a scandal when the suspicion arose that the North Rhine-Westphalian state association of the NPD was being controlled by V-persons from the protection of the constitution. The state chairman, his deputy and the editor-in-chief of the regional party newspaper Deutsche Zukunft were exposed as V-persons of the protection of the constitution. The unconstitutionality of the NPD was substantiated by the applicants mainly with quotes from informants of the constitution protection. The recruitment of informants in other cases also came under fire.

The legal representation of the NPD was carried out, among others, by the lawyer Horst Mahler . The former co-founder of the Red Army faction argued in the proceedings partly on the basis of his own experience with the undercover agent Peter Urbach , who was deployed in the student movement in the late 1960s .

Ex-Federal Minister of the Interior Otto Schily
  • October 2002: At a hearing, the Federal Constitutional Court had to clarify the influence of undercover agents of the constitution protection. The applicants refused to give the court the names of informants. Interior Minister Otto Schily (SPD) said that there was no control of the NPD by employees of the protection of the constitution.
  • On March 18, 2003, the Federal Constitutional Court announced that the prohibition proceedings would not be continued. The basis for the decision was the public hearing in October. A decisive blocking minority of three of the decisive seven constitutional judges of the responsible second senate saw a procedural obstacle by the V-persons for given. This was justified with the danger of the party's “lack of distance from the state” . The other judges only wanted to clarify in the main proceedings to what extent the constitution protection had influenced the appearance of the NPD. Due to the qualified two-thirds majority required in party prohibition proceedings, however, the three judges were sufficient to order the proceedings to be discontinued (see Section 15 (4) BVerfGG).

Second NPD ban proceedings

Because of the party's offensive and combative behavior, the submission of a new application for a ban to the Federal Constitutional Court has again been discussed in various ways in political circles since 2003.

At a meeting in Rostock-Warnemünde at the beginning of December 2012, the interior ministers of the federal states voted unanimously in favor of a new ban procedure. The Federal Constitutional Court rejected the application in January 2017 because the party had meanwhile become meaningless.

literature

  • Lars Flemming: The NPD ban procedure. From the 'uprising of the decent' to the 'uprising of the incompetent' (= extremism and democracy . Vol. 12). Nomos, Baden-Baden 2005. ISBN 978-3-8329-1344-1
  • Claus Leggewie , Horst Meier (ed.): Prohibition of the NPD or living with right-wing radicals. The positions . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002. ISBN 3-518-12260-6 .
  • Martin Möllers / Robert Chr. Van Ooyen (eds.): Party prohibition proceedings, 3rd edition, Frankfurt am Main 2011. ISBN 978-3-86676-137-7

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lars Flemming: The Failure of the Decent - Extremism requires vigilance, but blind actionism does harm. In: Das Parlament , No. 45, 2005. November 7, 2005, accessed December 5, 2012 .
  2. ^ The NPD prohibition process , Spiegel Online , January 25, 2002.
  3. ↑ Cf. Horst Meier, "Whether there is a concrete danger is irrelevant". Criticism of the ban applications against the NPD. In: Leviathan, Heft 4/2001 (abridged preprint in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung of October 21, 2001 under the title "A sack full of disgusting quotations").
  4. ^ Josef Hufelschulte, Thomas van Zütphen: V-Mann-Affair: Fatal Frenz-Connection. In: Focus Online . January 28, 2002, accessed October 16, 2010 .
  5. ^ Attorney Horst Mahler: Opinion of the respondent in the proceedings of the German Federal Government and others against NPD ( Memento of July 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). P. 31 ff, August 30, 2002
  6. ↑ Decision of the Federal Constitutional Court of March 18, 2003, Az. 2 BvB 1/01, 2 BvB 2/01 and 2 BvB 3/01
  7. ↑ Stephan Pötters: NPD ban: Constitutional hurdles. In: juraexamen.info. April 2, 2012, accessed December 5, 2012 .
  8. ↑ Interior ministers try a new NPD ban. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung Online . December 5, 2012, accessed December 5, 2012 .
  9. ^ Decision in Karlsruhe: Federal Constitutional Court does not prohibit NPD. In: Spiegel Online . January 17, 2017, accessed June 9, 2018 .