No success in the first instance: Dietmar Koschmieder, managing director of “Junge Welt” on Thursday in front of the Berlin district court.
Photo: dpa
A lawsuit brought by the daily newspaper “Junge Welt” against the Federal Republic of Germany was dismissed by the Berlin administrative court on Thursday. The newspaper published in Berlin had complained about being described as “left-wing extremist” in the Federal Ministry of the Interior’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution report and being monitored by the intelligence services on this basis. The “Junge Welt” wanted this entry to be deleted from all reports for the protection of the constitution. According to the “Junge Welt” in a special edition on the subject, the term “left-wing extremist” is not only harmful to business, but also contradicts freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
From the court’s point of view, there is no reason to prohibit the Federal Ministry of the Interior from further disseminating the reports (ref.: VG 1 K 437/21). The court ruled that the lawsuit brought by “Junge Welt” was only partially admissible: the defendant – that is, the Federal Republic – could no longer expect a lawsuit in the years before 2017. The statements of the more recent intelligence reports were found to be correct: It was true that the “Junge Welt” was striving for a communist-socialist social order based on the Marxist-Leninist model, even if the newspaper denied this in court.
During the hearing, the “Junge Welt” pointed out that a precise distinction had to be made between the terms “Marxism”, “Leninism” and “Communism” and that there was a lot of room for interpretation within these world views or schools of thought. The judges also came to the conclusion that there were close personal ties between the newspaper, the German Communist Party (DKP) and the so-called left-wing extremist milieu and that this fact confirmed the subversive intentions of the newspaper. Contrary to its self-description in court, the “Junge Welt” is more than an information medium, it “mobilizes” for political actions and is concerned with class overthrow. The newspaper had argued that bourgeois newspapers were also “mobilizing” their clientele. If necessary, the “Junge Welt” wants to take its lawsuit, which was rejected in the first instance, to the European Court of Human Rights. That could be expensive: the amount in dispute was set at 115,000 euros.
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