Call for action
If you (as an organisation) want to sign the call, just send an email to kontakt[at]nopolgbbg.de and we will add you to the list of supporters! For reasons of data collection and protection, we decided not to provide an online form.
No to the new Brandenburg police law! – Together against the attack on our freedom and fundamental rights!
Controversial Bavarian police law as a blueprint
The state government in Bavaria has demonstrated how quickly basic rights can be fundamentally called into question by a police law. As in other state governments, Interior Minister Karl-Heinz Schröter (SPD) is currently planning a new state police law in Brandenburg, which attacks principles of the rule of law such as the presumption of innocence and the separation of powers.
Police or already secret service?
The nature of the amendment published in July with the draft bill is clear: under the guise of counter-terrorism, the police are to receive new powers containing a long list of restrictions on fundamental rights. Introduced as a lesson from fascism, the constitutional rule of separation of secret service and police methods is increasingly being led ad absurdum. The „online search“ allows investigators to fully access the electronic communications of an individual (and their fellow human beings), whereabouts, photos, notes and other stored data. Furthermore, the police will be able to monitor encrypted communication with spyware, also called State Trojans (“Quellen-TKÜ“ – source telecommunications surveillance). These planned police powers go far beyond already legalized attacks on personal rights, such as house searches or eavesdropping on apartments, and threaten our privacy in the digital field.
“Fortune-telling of crimes” instead of presumption of innocence
The Brandenburg police law is not only problematic in the new methods of surveillance and repression. Similar to the term “imminent danger“ made public by the Bavarian legislative initiative, the new police law introduces a danger assessment by means of diffuse and undefined terms by the police. After that people can be monitored, taken in preventive detention or put on ankle restraints, even if these people are not actually suspicious. The concept of „imminent danger“ undermines the rule of law of the presumption of innocence and gives the police a „fortune-telling of crimes” that is unworthy of a democratic society and thus in no way acceptable.
From “counter-terrorism“ to the boundlessness of basic rights restrictions
The fact that the planned far-reaching restrictions on fundamental rights do not remain in the field of combating „terrorists“ is already a matter of political definatory power, which can change rapidly over time and with other political power relations.
Other innovations in the Brandenburg police law show that even with the current draft „terrorism“ is not only the focus of preventive surveillance and repression. The reporting requirements, which will be tightened by the law, will allow the police to decide who has to report regularly to a police station for up to a month. The reporting requirements are explicitly intended for the Assembly Act, especially for politically active people.
Fundamental rights: victims of a perceived sense of security
The tightening of state laws fits in with a security discourse that disregards any facts and analyses about crime or „terrorism“. Also, the new police law is not suitable for crime prevention. Rather, the rigid tightening of the law will generate an alleged increase of a diffuse sense of security.
New police law: threat to the safety of whole population groups
Not only the sense of security, but also the security situation of those, who are already often in the focus of the police, is massively disturbed. People with a migrant background are particularly affected by racist security discourses that put flight and migration in the same context as „crime and terrorism“. The unconstitutional “racial profiling“, that is, the occasion-independent police control and suspicion of, for example, individuals perceived as migrants, is a precursor of the newly proposed legal measures. However, the tightening of the police laws planned by Schröter and his fellow Interior Ministers concerns us all. Whether political activists, football fans, trade unionists, people without homes, people with mental health problems or even just hoodie wearers: the proposed police measures can and will be applied to all.
We are a broad, cosmopolitan alliance: we stand for fundamental rights and freedom!
In Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony, broad civic alliances are opposing the tightening of state police laws. Tens of thousands demonstrated against the attack on basic constitutional principles such as the presumption of innocence and the separation of powers.
Even in Brandenburg it is important to defend our freedom and fundamental rights against the planned tightening of the law:
- We want to inform about the planned measures and create a counter-public space!
- We want to prevent the tightening of the police law in Brandenburg! We also reject selective tightening of the police law!
- We are a broad alliance of democratic individuals, initiatives, organizations and parties, whose mission is to protect fundamental rights and freedoms. Racism and right-wing agitation have no place with us.
- We see ourselves as part of the nationwide resistance against the tightening of the police law. We are in solidarity with other initiatives that have set themselves the goal of preventing the new police laws in the federal states.
We show resistance to the new Brandenburg police law – everywhere and until the law is gone!