Brandenburg Administrative Court
The Brandenburg Administrative Court was the only administrative court in the state of Brandenburg in the Soviet Zone and the GDR .
After the Second World War , the victorious powers had declared the National Socialists' abolition of administrative jurisdiction in the Control Council Act 36. While administrative courts were being set up in the western zones , this process started very slowly in the SBZ (except in Thuringia). The reason for this was that the SED not only rejected the separation of powers , but also could not gain anything from the idea of independent control of administrative activities in a socialist society.
The constitution for the Mark Brandenburg of February 6, 1947 stipulated in article 43 "Administrative courts serve to protect against orders and orders of the administration."
In view of the inter-allied agreement, however , the SMAD pushed for the implementation of the constitutional mandate to set up administrative courts and, with Order No. 173, ordered the opening on October 1, 1947. The SED has now submitted a draft law to the state parliament . For the SED it was important that the administrative court was organizationally assigned to the SED-led Ministry of the Interior (Minister was Bernhard Bechler ) and not to the Justice Ministry under Ernst Stargardt ( CDU ). Above all, however, the SED rejected a general clause according to which all administrative processes should be subject to the control of the court and only permitted an enumerative list of specific processes.
Further conflicts arose over the appointment of the court president. After the SED appointed both the President of the Higher Regional Court and the Attorney General , both the CDU and the LDP demanded that their own candidates be considered. The CDU proposed the judge at the Higher Regional Court, Franz Krause , who was a CDU member, for this. However, the SED was not prepared to support a non-SED candidate. As a compromise, Walter Beckmann was proposed, who had come from the SPD and had become a member of the SED as part of the forced unification and who enjoyed general respect.
Since the deadline set by SMAD had been exceeded, Bechler appointed the President of the Brandenburg Higher Regional Court, Fritz Löwenthal as President of the Administrative Court, and Beckmann and Krause as judges, without the constitutional involvement of the State Parliament . In addition, 15 lay judges were appointed (of the 6 CDU and LDP members). On December 1, 1947, the court was opened in this line-up. Both Bechler and Löwenthal made it clear in their speeches that the Administrative Court would only intervene to a very limited extent in administrative activities.
After the completed facts had been created, the CDU and LDP demanded that a second chamber be given the opportunity to fill a director's post. A second chamber was then not created.
Based on the number of cases, this statement was correct. Many citizens' lawsuits against administrative acts have not been admitted by the government or the court. The Administrative Court only dealt with some disputes between parishes and parishes. In 1951 9 cases were counted, in 1952 another one.
The GDR constitution of 1949 also adopted the institution of administrative courts in Art. 138 I. However, this constitutional norm was not implemented. The law on the further democratization of the structure and functioning of the state organs in the countries of the German Democratic Republic led to the dissolution of the existing administrative courts in August / September 1952.
literature
- Dieter Pohl: Justice in Brandenburg 1945 to 1945, 2001, pp. 59–62
Individual evidence
- ^ Matthias Etzel: The repeal of National Socialist laws by the Allied Control Council (1945–1948); Volume 7 of Contributions to the Legal History of the 20th Century, 1992, ISSN 0934-0955 , ISBN 978-3-16-145994-8 , pp. 102-103, online
- ^ Journal of the GDR 1952, pp. 613, 614
- ^ Maira Mildred Susanne Baderschneider; The citizen as judge: an empirical study of the honorary judge at the general administrative courts, 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-61208-8 , pp. 13-14, online