Julian Reichelt recordsdata a constitutional grievance in opposition to the ban ruling | EUROtoday

DThe former editor-in-chief of the “Bild” newspaper Julian Reichelt has filed a constitutional grievance in opposition to a call by the Berlin Court of Appeal. The court docket had prohibited him from making any crucial statements concerning the federal authorities’s growth assist for Afghanistan (ref. 10 W 184/23). Reichelt sees this as violating his basic proper to freedom of expression.

Reichelt’s lawyer Joachim Nikolaus Steinhöfel explains within the constitutional grievance that the Chamber Court violated his shopper’s proper to freedom of expression in two methods: by falsely figuring out an expression of opinion as a press release of truth and by assuming that Reichelt’s assertion constituted a “serious impairment of the functionality” of a authorized entity public regulation as a result of it endangers the general public’s belief within the work of the authority. What is supposed is that Reichelt’s assertion “Germany paid 370 million euros (!!!) in development aid to the Taliban (!!!!!!) in the last two years” was supposed to extend residents’ belief within the work of Federal Development Aid Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD) or their ministry.

The core of freedom of expression, the constitutional grievance says, consists of precisely what the Berlin Court of Appeal has banned: criticism of the federal government. Public criticism of the federal government – ​​“criticism of power” – is a fundamental part of free journalism. In order to assist this place, the constitutional grievance refers to quite a few media stories – from newspapers, private and non-private broadcasters – and to assessments by NGOs and consultants with an analogous tenor, which solely don’t formulate the content material of the court docket dispute as pointedly as Reichelt did : the query is whether or not the federal authorities just isn’t at the least not directly supporting the Taliban regime by means of its growth assist for Afghanistan, even when the cash doesn’t go on to the Islamists.

Reichelt’s clear evaluation was accompanied by a hyperlink that described the precise allocation of growth funds. The Berlin Regional Court discovered this interplay to be permissible within the first occasion and rejected the applying for an interim injunction that Federal Development Aid Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD) had filed in opposition to Reichelt (ref. 27 O 410/23). The Berlin Court of Appeal granted the applying within the second occasion.