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GERMANY
Germany has no history of religious freedom or tolerance but has a tragic one of religious persecution. With the horror of the Holocaust vividly in mind, after WWII a Constitution was drawn up for Germany mandating that the government remain neutral in religious matters. Germany’s constitution also guarantees religious freedom and the country has ratified the ICCPR and the Optional Protocol.
With these protections in place, it would seem that minorities in Germany are safeguarded against religious persecution. While this is theoretically true, the events of the last five years show that many German officials have undermined both the spirit and the law of Germany’s human rights obligations. Although the Constitution is above all binding on the government, government officials have, as it were, turned it on its head by discriminating against religious minorities such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses with the justification that these religions are unconstitutional.
Police brutality against Muslims, predominantly Turks and Kurds, is particularly severe in Germany, compounded by the refusal of the government to take effective remedies. In one two-year period, more than 1,000 hate crimes were documented, many of them against Muslims. Many Muslim minorities are denied citizenship, even though they have lived in Germany all their lives. Anti-Semitism is also increasing.
In 1997, a major study by the Human Rights Centre of Essex University, England, found that “In Germany, democracy is used as an ideology to impose conformity. It has been dismaying to discover that the state, and some of its politicians and people, are using what are known from the past to be well-worn paths of discrimination and intolerance and of inciting intolerance towards a new religious minority, the Scientologists.”
The study continued, “recent years have seen an astonishing and, for post-war Western Europe, unique policy of official, and officially endorsed, vilification of and discrimination against certain of these groups including the Jehovah’s Witnesses and, most particularly, the Church of Scientology.” In a move unprecedented anywhere else in the world, the German government placed members of the Church of Scientology under surveillance in June 1997.
The same month, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Religious Intolerance visited Germany on an official fact-finding visit to investigate reports of religious discrimination. In his report, published in Spring 1998, he established that religious minorities including Jahovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, Bahais, the Unification Church and especially the Church of Scientology face a climate of intolerance and distrust kept alive by state publications and directives as well by the media. The Special Rapporteur recommended that ‘the state, beyond day-to-day management, must implement a strategy to prevent intolerance in the field of religion and belief... sustained efforts are required to promote and develop a culture of tolerance and human rights.’
The consequences of an absence of such a culture were vividly illustrated in the case of Otto Dreksler, a senior officer of the Berlin police force. Based solely on anonymous letters falsely claiming that he belonged to the Church of Scientology, Mr. Dreksler was suspended from his post, his house, office, car and personal computer were raided and he was subjected to a campaign of social ostracism for a period lasting several months. He and his family were made virtual outcasts. As the government was using Mr. Dreksler’s case to claim that the Church was “infiltrating” members into civil service positions, the Church filed two suits against the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the government security agency which had provided the information on which the claim of Mr. Dreksler’s membership of Scientology was based. The government capitulated and the Berlin Interior Ministry had to publicly retract its statement that Mr. Dreksler was a Church member, reinstate him with an overdue promotion and apologise to him. After it was revealed that the false information about Dreksler had come from an ex-Stasi agent in the employ of the Berlin OPC, the Berlin Interior Senator resigned.
The incident brought home that in a climate conducive to witchhunts, anyone’s reputation and career may easily be destroyed. German politicians expressed justifiable outrage at the treatment of Mr. Dreksler, but seemed not to realise that governmental discrimination against actual Scientologists is equally worthy of censure.
In the autumn of 1998, following the September elections, a new government took power consisting of a coalition of the Social Democrats with the environmentalist Green Party.
The incident brought home that in a climate conducive to withchunts, anyone’s reputation and career may easily be destroyed. German politicians expressed justifiable outrage at the treatment of Mr. Dreksler, but seemed not to realise that governmental discrimination against actual Scientologists is equally worthy of censure.
Despite the constitutional requirement for the government to remain neutral in religious matters, the Catholic and Lutheran Churches exert considerable influence on the government in a nation whose dominant party until the elections of September 1998 was the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Continued...
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