Recommendations of the Editorial team
“Time crime”, “Lust of Murder”, “The trace of the perpetrators”, “Stern Crime”-there are countless true crime formats in Germany. In this country you particularly like to indulge in the fear of fear and see, hear and read with great interest from the most scary crimes in the neighborhood.
However, these upper grim novel, which report on the naked reality of human violence, are not harmless. It’s about real perpetrators and real victims. And here the problem for the profiled media lawyer Christian Schertz starts.
In his view, victim rights are disregarded in the vast majority of all cases. Rather, the personal fate of people is even used in order to generate the switch-on quota, edition and click numbers, said Schertz in a conversation with the victim protection organization “Weisser Ring” (via “Kress”).
The difference between victim and personal rights
Even if there are no violations of victim law, many true crime formats disregarded the personal rights of deceased. You could do this because they go out with death. According to Schertz, the postmortal respect and dignity claim would be violated if crime scene photos or even corpse photos of victims of crimes were shown as part of an entertainment show.
It is such a thing with the right to the image of deceased: it is still ten years after death, but in reality, bereaved often have to fight here so that it is adhered to. Christian Schertz believes that there can also be no reasonable information on the public, “which are moved back into the light of the public again, even though they are convicted and closed”.
The producers of such true crime formats also disregarded that, especially in the case of victims or eyewitnesses of deeds, retraumatizations could occur to a considerable extent if the deeds were dragged back into the public.
Some true crime formats exceed boundaries
In this context, Schertz considers it unspeakably if surveys were still made whether you think a perpetrator is guilty or innocent (the media lawyer speaks here of the “Bayern 3 True Crime” podcast). “It is highly dubious to introduce a jury system for entertainment purposes as part of a show.”
As a result of the true crime floods, Schertz demands the introduction of a post-mortal right of personal rights: “It is an almost perverse and almost unbearable situation that the murderers are often no longer allowed to be identified due to their personal rights and, based on the existing right to resocialization, the personal rights of the victim became.”