While much of Europe has done away with passport checks, German police received judiciary approval to demand official ID of "foreign-looking" people. Human rights groups call the ruling discriminatory and illegal.
The Germans are getting nervous, it appears, and being a decisive people, they are acting upon it.
Passengers on trains travelling from Germany to La Belle France don't have to show their passports to cross the border, but a ruling from a German administrative court this week allows police to require "foreign-looking" passengers traveling on German trains to produce identification papers regardless of whether they are under suspicion of any wrongdoing.
The ruling stems from the case of a dark-skinned German placed in long-term storage by federal police after he refused to show his identification papers while traveling in a regional train. The man, who was not identified by the court in the western German city of Koblenz, had a verbal confrontation with the uniformed officers and later sued them for discrimination after he was forced to identify himself because of his skin color.
During the court hearing, one of the officers said he approached people who looked foreign to him. The court ruled the officer was within his rights to use appearance, including skin color, as the only reason to check a person's identity. The plaintiff had argued that police only had the right to demand papers of someone they suspected posed an "immediate danger."
The court said police had authority to check people's identity and residency status based on their appearance to fight illegal immigration. The ruling added that such checks were permitted only on rail lines that could be used to provide illegal entry to Germany or lead to breaches of Germany's Aliens Act.
"For reasons of capacity and efficiency, the federal police are limited to conducting spot checks," the court said in its ruling, adding that the officers were within their rights to use appearance in deciding whom to check.
Police said the ruling would make it easier for them to do their jobs.
"In just the last year, illegal immigration has increased by 20 percent to more than 20,000 confirmed cases," said Josef Scheuring of the German police union, adding that fighting this crime justified stricter controls.
Rights groups, however, voice their strong opposition to the court's ruling, saying that no German court had ever allowed skin color to be the deciding factor in whether police could demand to check a person's identity.
"The federal police have exceptional powers to initiate checks without suspecting wrongdoing," said Petra Pollmar-Otto of the German Institute for Human Rights. "But what this ruling confirms is a breach of a human rights ...which often intentionally defined so widely as to be meaningless... ban on racial discrimination."
In response to an official inquiry by the Green Party, the German government in July 2011 wrote that legal checks of people not under suspicion of wrongdoing could not be conducted based on a person's origin, skin color or religion.
Karl Kopp of the rights group Pro Asyl said, "The court's ruling was not in accordance with the understanding of how police work in a democratic, constitutional state."
Alexander Klose, a Berlin-based lawyer who focuses on cases of discrimination, said he was surprised by the ruling.
"We now have legal evidence from a court showing that the federal police have regularly been practicing so-called ethnic profiling, that's something we did not know before," he said. "Such practices - that people can be selected for an identity check based on their appearance - have been denied until now by those responsible in the German Interior Ministry as well as the federal police."
Ahead of being taken into custody, the plaintiff in the case accused the police of using Nazi tactics by demanding to know his identity and searching his backpack after he refused to produce identity documents.
It has not been decided if an appeal will be lodged, but Klose said he saw grounds to do so.
"Employers, for example, are bound by the anti-discrimination laws and previous bad experiences with particular individuals cannot be an argument in the future," he said. "And what we rightfully demand of private employers and landlords we should also demand of the police as an organ of the state."
"Of course it is important that this ruling is corrected," said Kopp. "But it is just as important that the federal government clarifies laws dealing with suspicion-free identity checks so that a racial color code no longer plays a role in a country with millions of citizens who don't have pink skin."
Continued on Page 47
#5
Grom, me too. On the one hand, there's good reason to be concerned about many of the 'foreigners.' But on the other hand, Germans have a history of carrying things a little too far when dealing with population groups they consider problematic.
Click on the gentleman's name to see the other stories about him in Rantburg's archive.
A NUCLEAR scientist accused of plotting an kaboom that would have destroyed "a city the size of London" went on trial in Gay Paree yesterday.
Alleged al-Qaeda agent Adlene Hicheur is accused of compiling a "hit list" of targets that included French president Nicolas Sarkozy ...23rd and current President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra. Sarkozy is married to singer-songwriter Carla Bruni, who has a really nice birthday suit... and his former interior minister, Brice Hortefeux.
The 35-year-old French-Algerian was tossed in the calaboose in a joint MI5 and French intelligence sting three years ago while researching the Big Bang theory at the CERN nuclear laboratory near Geneva.
Officials said they intercepted e-mails he exchanged with al-Qaeda's North African branch, in which he plotted to blow up a Total oil refinery and a French military base.
In one e-mail to suspected Islamic terror chief Mustapha Debchi, Hicheur said he would "propose possible objectives in Europe and particularly in La Belle France".
He wrote in March 2009: "Concerning the matter of objectives, they differ depending on the different results sought after the hits.
"For example: if it's about punishing the state because of its military activities in Moslem countries -- Afghanistan -- then it should be a purely military objective. For example: the airbase at Karan Jefrier near Annecy in La Belle France. This base trains troops and sends them to Afghanistan."
In June 2009, Debchi asked Hicheur: "Don't beat around the bush: are you prepared to work in a unit becoming active in La Belle France?"
Hicheur replied: "Concerning your proposal, the answer is of course YES but there are a few observations. If your proposal relates to a precise strategy -- such as working in the heart of the main enemy's house and emptying its blood of strength -- then I should revise the plan that I've prepared."
French intelligence sources said money transfers had also taken place between the pair.
One security source said at the time: "He [Hicheur] had offered his services to strike with an active service unit based in La Belle France.
"He had started to compile a precise list of intended targets, including a Total oil refinery which would have caused an kaboom which would have destroyed a city the size of London.
"Assassination targets including the president and interior minister were also on the list."
Magistrates investigating the case said Hicheur's e-mails "crossed the line of simple debate of political or religious ideas to enter the sphere of terrorist violence".
At CERN -- the European Organisation for Nuclear Research -- Hicheur worked on the large hadron collider, a device designed to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.
Hicheur's lawyer now fears his trial for "criminal association as part of a terrorist enterprise" could be jeopardised by the seven murders committed by in Toulouse by Mohamed Merah.
Patrick Baudouin said: "There is not the least proof against Mr Hicheur of any terrorist intention. He has since the beginning been painted as the ideal guilty party. When the justice system gets going it finds it difficult to admit its mistakes."
Hicheur, who denies the charge, faces ten years in prison if convicted.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Barbara ||
04/01/2012 2:29 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Al Qaeda, several affiliates and other groups have been trying for some time to get hold of one or more tactical nukes, as well as chem and bio weapons and radiological materials for dirty bombs. FWIW
And yes, I know about delivery systems, aerosol dispersal issues w/ bioagents etc. The threat is real, difficulties notwithstanding.
And then there are the more standard kaboom plans, such as setting off a refinery. Also effective, if managed.
#6
Hicheur's lawyer now fears his trial for "criminal association as part of a terrorist enterprise" could be jeopardised by the seven murders committed by in Toulouse by Mohamed Merah
[AFP] Seventeen people jugged by French police in a crackdown on suspected Islamist networks might have been plotting a kidnap, the head of the police intelligence's unit said Saturday.
"They appeared to be preparing a kidnap," Bernard Squarcini of the Central Directorate for Domestic Intelligence (DCRI) told La Provence newspaper.
He did not elaborate on the alleged plot, but said the group was made up of "Frenchies" who were involved in "collective war-like training, linked to a violent, religious indoctrination."
Some of those incarcerated belonged to a suspected cut-throat group called Forsane Alizza,
...Knights of Pride, they are were a soft jihad organization which aimed by public spectacle to remind the kufrs of France of their approaching dhimmitude. First noticed by the public when they invaded a Limoges McDonalds to shout antisemitic slogans in 2010, they subsequently got in the habit of leading prayer services in the streets, to block traffic. It is estimated there are only about 100 cadres, though recently they have been advertising for new members. The interior ministry banned them in February of this year for encouraging their fellow citizens to join the jihad in Afghanistan, as a result of which they seem to have decided to move on to more exciting pursuits...
he said.
"The group was dissolved as of February 29 and the funds of 26 of its members were frozen, but they continued to carry out physical training exercises in parks and woods and sought weapons," Squarcini told the Marseille-based newspaper. They were involved in paintball gun games, he said.
The arrests on Friday took place in several cities, including Toulouse, where cut-thoat gunman Mohamed Merah was rubbed out by police last week after a series of cold-blooded shootings that left seven dead, including three Jewish children.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy ...23rd and current President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra. Sarkozy is married to singer-songwriter Carla Bruni, who has a really nice birthday suit... said the arrests were not directly linked to the Merah case, but he has called on police to increase its surveillance of "radical Islam" in what the opposition has described as a vote-catching move just a month ahead of a presidential election.
In the course of the latest arrests, police recovered "several computers, sim cards, weapons, money, 10,000 euros in small notes, four Kalashnikov rifles, eight rifles, seven or eight handguns, a taser, tear gas grenades," Squarcini said.
Those jugged were still being held on remand Saturday, police said.
CNN reports their lawyer says they're all innocent of everything.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
