The criminal liability of public approval, denial and gross trivialization of genocides, crimes against humanity and war crimes should in future be explicitly mentioned in the Criminal Code (StGB).

It is planned to add a new paragraph to Section 130 of the Criminal Code (incitement to hatred). The Legal Committee accepted a corresponding proposal from the coalition factions of the SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens and the FDP on Wednesday morning with votes from the coalition factions as well as the CDU/CSU and Die Linke factions against the votes of the AfD faction. This is an unrelated amendment to the Federal Government's “Draft of an Eighth Act to Amend the Federal Central Register Act” ( 20/3708 ). The amended draft passed the committee with the same vote. The second and third reading in the Bundestag is planned for Thursday.

As the coalition groups explain in their amendment, the change is due to infringement proceedings initiated by the EU Commission in December 2021.

The Commission complained that Germany had inadequately implemented the “Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 November 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by criminal law”, particularly with regard to public denial and gross trivialization. As the factions write, these two acts - except for the reference to acts under the rule of National Socialism (Section 130 Paragraph 3 StGB) - have not yet been explicitly mentioned in a criminal provision. “As a rule, such actions are likely to be covered by the offense of incitement to hatred according to Section 130 Paragraph 1 Number 1 of the Criminal Code,” the parliamentary groups write. The change should now make it clear that public approval, denial and gross trivialization are “expressly penalized”.

According to the new paragraph 5 in Section 130 of the Criminal Code, these acts can be punished with a prison sentence of up to three years or a fine.

The prerequisite is that the public approval, denial or gross trivialization of international crimes (§§ 6 to 12 of the International Criminal Code) refers to the majority of people mentioned in paragraph 1 number 1 of the paragraph “or against an individual because of his or her membership in one of these majority of people”. In paragraph 1, the majority of people are named as “a national, racial, religious or ethnic group” and “parts of the population”. Furthermore, the approval, denial or gross trivialization must be carried out in a way “that is likely to incite hatred or violence against such a person or majority of people and to disturb public peace”.

As the coalition factions explain, the new criminal provision deviates in two aspects from the criminal provision for the approval, denial and trivialization of genocide under National Socialist rule.

On the one hand, with the new criminal provision, only “gross trivialization” is punishable. The parliamentary groups justify the comparatively higher requirements by saying that, against the background of German history, it is justified “that the area of ​​criminal statements regarding the trivialization of the Holocaust in Section 130 Paragraph 3 of the Criminal Code is somewhat broader than that for trivializing statements other crimes under international law.” Similarly, the amendment justifies the higher penalty for trivializing the Holocaust of five years' imprisonment: "Because of the unique nature of the Holocaust, higher penalties must be possible for its approval, denial and trivialization in individual cases than for comparable statements regarding other crimes under international law."

The coalition factions also state that by including statements made in a meeting, the new regulation goes “slightly beyond the minimum requirements of the framework decision”. This is “necessary to avoid systematic contradictions”. In addition, according to the group's statement, no use was made of the possibility of limiting the criminal liability of denial and gross trivialization only to those international crimes that have been finally established by a national or international court. “It would be unjustifiable that a crime under international law has to be finally established by a court in the case of denial and gross trivialization, while such a judicial determination should not be relevant if the same actual event is approved,” it says.

The planned change in the Federal Central Register Act is intended, among other things, to implement European law requirements. The hib report on the government draft: https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldeen-913824

Download: Recommendation of the Legal Affairs Committee .

source

German Bundestag

Also read: Denigration of women as sedition


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