I can’t read German, but we have a similar legal system in the Netherlands.
Most likely, these people committed some crime during a previous protest, such as illegally entering private property or vandalism. Often they will get sentences that are conditional.
If there is evidence to believe they are conspiring to commit a similar illegal act, then the conditional part of the sentence gets triggered.
Nope, it’s actually only that the police has reason to believe that they might commit a crime.
No need for them to be prior offenders or anything. The police can arrest anyone at any time if they believe you might commit a crime. And even comparatively minor things like blocking traffic counts.
It doesn’t sound like it. Conspiracy means there’s documented evidence of a plan and motive to commit a crime. This doesn’t seem like it meets that standard.
Thanks. I have no clue about German law. Oddly even though America has a large German population historically, our laws are based on English, French and Spanish laws.
The difference in regards to a conspiracy charge is that you don’t need a conspiracy behind it.
In Germany, there are actually 18 different laws regarding this, since that part of the law is federated. So each state of Germany (plus the federal police and the federal criminal police) has it’s own law regarding under what circumstances they are allowed to arrest someone before they committed a crime and for how long.
Originally, these laws had two purposes:
Stop someone from committing a serious crime
Stop someone from doing harm to themselves
And as such, these laws used to have tight limits on when they can apply and for how long people are allowed to be arrested.
A case could be made for these laws. E.g. if someone announces online that they are going to shoot kids at a school, it would be totally justified to quickly bag that guy before he kills children. Waiting for a court order might not be fast enough to save the would-be victims.
But then they started to expand the reasons why someone can be arrested and for how long.
In Bavaria, for example, it’s enough that someone carries items that can be used for criminal purposes. And there they can jail people for up to two months without a charge.
There have been cases where someone was put in jail for two months for carrying items like crowbars or ropes in their backpacks.
It’s really something for the lawyers but it could be considered “Nötigung” (§ 181 StGB) and/or “Gefährlicher Eingriff in den Straßenverkehr” (§ 315b StGB).
Pretty sure if it’s in the StGB it’s a “crime” (Straftat).
In English, at least for the US, there are typically only misdemeanors and felonies, and both are crimes. There are also violations, but those are usually civil, not criminal (parking tickets, for example).
Yeah, in English (in the US, generally) we’d call that a civil violation. Or a civil action where a lawsuit is brought by a private citizen, like suing someone for damaging your property. It’s against the law, but probably not going to be prosecuted by the government.
But this is in fact how the police argues. Climate protests are terror attacks (since they disrupt traffic) and therefore this is justified.
Pretty sure the Bundesverfassungsgericht (basically our supreme court) will shut this practice down – just like all the other times Bavarian laws have been ruled unconstitutional – but Bavaria doesn’t care. They scrap the law and replace it with a similar unconstitutional version and wait 2 years until the Bundesverfassungsgericht rules it unconstitutional and so on.
It’s basically our texas or florida, depending on your pov. It’s a place with great nature, interesting culture but also very crude beliefs and you either like the culture or you dont. Most importantly, police is said to be a pot rougher over there and politics is pretty conservative as well.
Kind of. Iirc it’s a very controversial practice and whenever the police pulls it out in a public case it gets protested again (for good reason). Also, even if the practice is legal right now, there’s a lot of limitations to it. Obviously it’s nudging the ethical boundaries of police work either way.
Maybe they should arrest everyone that might protest against this before they arrest the other people that might protest against climate change. But then people might protest against that too. I guess everyone is under arrest! You’re all under arrest. Get in the hole!
I don’t believe it is a very popular story so that might be the reason.
It was popular enough for me to have known about it before I saw the emoji.
Why is there even an Emoji for the book? Does it come up that often on hexchat?
Because the Hexbear creator of emojis decided it’d be fun to add it, and it was almost immediately used to summarize bleak and terrible future outcomes, especially in reference to this moment mocking the tendency of tech billionaires to miss the point of the fiction they consume and make announcements about how they want to make the bad things in such fiction come true:
Edit: oh and what is stormfront? Edit 2: the “I have no mouth…” game is also pretty great and was given away for free on GOG a while back so you might already have it, if you keep track of those things. That game is inspired by the book but it is mainly it’s own story.
That’s just a little jab at Reddit itself for its cryptofascist leanings. The emoji that Hexbear marks as “Reddit” uses the text of Reddit’s old Stormfront community, which was itself a nazi hangout until it was mod-raided to become a weather forecast community, but the name’s meaning persisted.
Last generation: 27 climate demonstrators in Bavaria were preventively imprisoned
In the run-up to the IAA motor show, the police in Bavaria took activists from the last generation into so-called preventative detention. The procedure is very controversial.
By Kai Biermann
September 2, 2023, 4:14 pm
According to Last Generation, Bavarian authorities have currently put a total of 27 supporters of the group in prison without trial or verdict. This means that the number of activists in preventive detention has almost doubled, the group writes in a statement. They are therefore being held in the Stadelheim and Memmingen correctional facilities.
A large number of them were apparently taken into custody in connection with the IAA International Motor Show, which is scheduled to take place in Munich from September 5th to 10th. The last generation had announced protests against the fair. According to Last Generation, at least 16 of those affected are in custody until September 10th.
Eleven more are expected to serve longer sentences. According to Munich police, ten of them were taken into custody during a blockade on Friday. The Munich district court then ordered that they remain in prison until September 30th.
Nowhere as long as in Bavaria
Legally, this police approach is called preventive detention because it is not detention for a crime that has been committed. The police laws of the different states allow this for different lengths of time. In Bavaria, up to one month in prison is permitted, which may be extended by a judge for a maximum of another month. In other federal states, however, it is usually only a few days.
The so-called preventive or preventive detention is very controversial. The relevant laws were originally created to prevent terrorists from carrying out attacks. However, this form of detention is now also permitted in the case of the “imminent commission or continuation of an administrative offense of considerable importance for the general public,” as the Bavarian police law states. Lawsuits against this have so far been rejected in Bavaria. However, a final clarification about the legality of this approach is still pending.
This form of deprivation of liberty is all the more problematic because the protesters will not face imprisonment if they are convicted for a blockade. The corresponding procedures regularly only end with fines.
Carla Rochel, the spokesperson for the Last Generation, writes in the statement: “The question we as a society have to ask ourselves at this moment is: Do we think it’s okay that protest for all of our basic right to life means prison instead of climate protection is answered?”
Thank you for the translation. This is exactly why people need to be wary of tools used against bad actors, that will then be used against everyone. A tool in the toolbox will be used by the police. Slippery slope is real. Once you establish precedent the tool is useful, you’ll see it again.
In Canada I’m very wary of the current trial against the leaders of the Freedom Convoy for this reason. Popular sentiment at the time of their protest was that they were bad for blocking the road, and what comes from this trial could set precedent that could be used to criminalize climate and social justice protests in the future.
The Freedom Convoy in Canada fought for the deaths of disabled and elderly people so they could be irresponsible. It’s not anywhere near the same thinf
I am well aware. But if precedent is set that protesting in the streets won’t be allowed going forward, it will have negative ramifications for leftist movements.
Bad actors are everywhere and are especially drawn to positions of power (normal people see life-changing power over others as a major responsability, hence a burden).
This is why you limit power concentration on any single individual or organisation, have checks-and-balances on power and have higher demands of transparency and reporting one those with power than on run-of-the-mill citizens.
Of course the assholes drawn to power will do everything they can to subvert, nullify, remove or bypass those mechanisms and the reasons why we see right here in how these people (never forget, organisations are not sentient: it’s always people making decisions) because they could choose to use these kind of laws that break the spirit of the Rule Of Law in democracies - which we were told were for use against terrorists (a very specific type of mass murder) - against demonstrators who have not even committed an actual crime and whose history indicated that the biggest crime the would ever commit would be mild property damage, something nowhere near the range of actual murder, much less mass murder.
Oh, look those of us that were pointing out the risk of abuse of all those high-overreach laws passed in the aftermath of 9/11 during peak “terrorist scare” (even though more people died from falling in their bathtubs than from terrorist attacks) are once again proven right.
Half of the voting population. Less people actually agree with conservatives in the US than our voting splits indicate. They are either indifferent or have been suppressed from voting.
As much as Germany denies it, it has been proven in the last 10 or so years that they really loved their nazi days. France seems to also love having been under nazi occupation too, and they seem to have a similar anti-environmentalist attitude.
I mean, Nazis have a consistent record of being everything anti human and good personified. Capitalists want oil production to continue, they’ll fund fascists to be their force to ensure it goes uninterrupted
Nazis were largely wiped out before society at large realized Carbon emissions were a problem. Externalizing problems with our nation states on “Nazi Gremlins” instead of our lack of dedication to freedom is exactly why these theoretical protestors are political prisoners.
The NSDAP was wiped out in 1945 but denazification was woefully incomplete and individual Nazis held positions of power in institutions like NATO, NASA, West German intelligence, etc, well after the 50s. That’s just direct members of the NSDAP and not all the neo-nazi splinter parties which West Germany and United Germany by their own admissions never wiped out. Add onto that various explicitly neo-Nazi groups in other countries and active militant Nazi-adjacent groups overseas and I don’t think it’s accurate or productive to say that Nazism has been “largely wiped out”.
The tactics are tyrannical but not uniquely fascist. Jailing political opponents because they angered the crown is a European tradition that predates Rome.
Fascist is also what humanity uses to refer to actual fascism, which is having a pretty unfortunate resurgence at the moment. Its not just referring to tyranny.
Their motivations were still racist and bad, but the Nazis in Germany were not anti-environment.
Unless you mean modern Nazis, at which point ok maybe I haven’t really researched modern Nazis. I know the people they support certainly are, whether they admit they’re Nazis or not.
I do think though that the parent comment was mainly referring to detaining people without due process when talking about Nazi Germany, rather than the environmental perspective.
I think France misses the height of their days of imperialism. Germany definitely at the very least is still heavily influenced by Hitler’s propaganda (as is much of the EU tbh)
Additional Context: The state government of Bavaria (and several others around that same period, with similar ideas) passed a controversial reform of police laws in 2017-2018 (It was polemically called “The strictest police law since 1945”).
It included changes such as:
increased allowance of use of personal data by the police forces.
allowing the police to openly film and photograph people participating in public gatherings.
allowing the police to infringe on postal secrecy and to confiscate mail without a person’s knowledge. (if given permission by the courts)
allowing the use of police spies. Including even entering people’s homes if given permission.
As well as making previous restrictions such as on “probable danger” way more lax.
This is specifically Bavaria. They also recently found out that their vice president has a past as a Nazi and the reaction of their president was essentially “Oh no. Anyway…”. So, yeah, if you considered visiting the Oktoberfest, maybe reconsider.
Eh, I don’t expect random tourists to be locked up by the fascists, nor do I necessarily expect the not-quite-fascists to distance themselves from the fascists, just from losses in the tourism industry.
I’m mostly just saying, there’s tons of places you could be traveling to and “drinking beer with fascists” isn’t quite as attractive anymore.
To be fair, in this case 16 people are already free since yesterday. The other 9 have been taken into custody while demonstrating. Not because of the demonstrating itself, but for various reasons, ranging from resistance against the police to cases where they technically endangered someones live by blocking emergency vehicles. They will be in jail for another 19 days. Another reason for longer jail sentences are them being impossible to learn, aka. not changing behaviour from previous incidents.