From Hildburg Bruns
Berlin’s judiciary is throwing on the turbo with the climate stickers. Blockers are now to be sentenced in accelerated proceedings, reports the daily newspaper “taz”.
Apparently, a new business distribution plan from the Tiergarten District Court makes it possible. In the future, five departments alone will deal with proceedings against climate glue – but only two judges’ positions are occupied.
According to this, only a few days or at most weeks could elapse between the blockade and a court hearing. But it only works if the files are forwarded from the police to the public prosecutor’s office and from there to the court on a daily basis.
Inga Wahlen, spokeswoman for the Berlin criminal courts, confirmed to the BZ that two judges are now ready to process applications from the public prosecutor’s office for accelerated proceedings. However, no applications have been received so far.
So far, different magistrates have given very different verdicts. In the future, work will therefore be concentrated on a few colleagues.
Critics speak in the taz of “a kind of special tribunal”. On the other hand, the SPD legal expert Jan Lehmann (51) on BZ: “Accelerated procedures have proven their worth in the past when comparable crimes have been committed many times and you want quick legal certainty. So that a judgment is not only made after 20 acts.”
On the other hand, the left-wing MP Sebastian Schlüsselburg (40) says: “I will inspect the files to understand how this about-face came about. I very much hope that there was no political influence here.”
Benjamin Jendro from the Berlin police union supports the Blitz procedures: “We don’t understand the excitement at all. The StPO enables accelerated procedures and we are now talking about mass crimes that have been tying up large capacities in the police, public prosecutor and judiciary for more than a year. The last generation wants to paralyze democratic institutions. The rule of law must be able to act, because there are other crime phenomena in Berlin that need to be dealt with.”