Draft:NPD-Ban Proceedings (2001-2003)
On January 30 2001, the German Federal Government under chancellor Gerhard Schröder instructed the Federal Constitutional Court to investigate the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), with the goal of achieving a ban on the party. On March 30 2001, the German Bundestag and Bundesrat followed with their own ban proposals.
The proceedings were discontinued by the Federal Constitutional Court on 18 March 2003 for procedural reasons: So called “V-Leute”, confidential informants of German intelligence agencies, turned out to be active in the leadership of the party. Following this, the question of whether the NPD is an unconstitutional party was not further examined.
Initiative
[edit]The initiative for banning the National Democratic Party largely came from the Bavarian Minister of the Interior, Günther Beckstein, who initially requested action to be taken in August 2000. Momentum for the matter was created after a series of attacks with partly suspected and partly proven xenophobic backgrounds. A bomb attack on a group of Jewish immigrants from Russia on July 27, 2000, played a special role: Although the crime remained unsolved, xenophobic motives were suspected. Voices calling for a ban on the NPD grew louder among all mayor german political parties except the FDP, which feared the motion would fail.
Justification for the Ban
[edit]The ban applications were comprehensively justified by the involved governmental bodies, the federal government, federal council and the federal parliament. A detailed analysis of the reasons of the ban instantly provoked doubt about its feasibility: The evidence presented against the NPD and its officials was limited to the accusation of anti-constitutional propaganda, in particular, incitement to hatred. More serious crimes, particularly the use of violence or its preparation, could only be attributed to the party in a few cases.
Domestic Intelligence Agency Involvement & Scandal
[edit]The ban proceedings grew into a scandal when suspicions arose that the North Rhine-Westphalian division of the far right extremist NPD was actually controlled by informants of the German Domestic Intelligence Agency. NPD’s state chairman Udo Holtmann and his deputy Wolfgang Frenz were exposed as such informants, which are colloquially called “V-Männer” (from “Verbindungs-Männer”, german for “contact men”). The allegations of the party’s unconstitutionality heavily relied on quotes and statements from the aforementioned confidential informants as proof. The affair also triggered criticism of the recruitment and utilisation of such informants in other cases.
Court Case
[edit]The Federal Constitutional Court had to clarify the influence of undercover investigators of the Domestic Intelligence Agency in a hearing in October 2002. The applicants refused to provide the court with the names of the informants. Moreover, minister of the interior Otto Schily declared that there had been no controlling of the NPD through employees of the Domestic Intelligence Agency.
On March 18, 2003, the Federal Constitutional Court announced that the ban proceedings would not be continued. The decision was based on the hearing in October, where three out of five members of the court ruled that the undercover informants were a critical obstacle to the proceedings. The remaining judges wanted to clarify the extent to which the Domestic Intelligence Agency had influenced the public image of the NPD, suggesting the topic should be dealt with only in the main court case. In Germany, party bans require a two-thirds majority in the Federal Constitutional Court, leading to the discontinuation of the case until its second iteration in 2012.