The Statement
A LANDMARK legal decision declared that regional containment policies – including lockdowns, social distancing, prohibitions on gatherings by family or friends) are UNCONSTITUTIONAL. The judge called the lockdowns a “catastrophically wrong political decision with dramatic consequences for almost all areas of people’s lives.”
The judge ruled that the government violated the “inviolably guaranteed human dignity” under basic German law.
…..
In the long term, containment-related excess mortality will likely be significantly larger than the death toll from COVID 19.
Since the containment policy in Thuringia is part of a general policy of almost all western industrialized countries, this damage is the indirect consequence also attributable to the pro rata and is therefore in principle linked to the examination of proportionality .
For this reason alone, the standards to be assessed here do not meet the requirement of proportionality. Added to this are the direct and indirect restrictions on freedom, gigantic financial damage, immense damage to health and spiritual damage.
The word ” disproportionate ” is too colorless to indicate the dimensions of what happened. The containment policy implemented by the Land government in the spring (and today again), of which the general ban on contact was (and remains) essential, is a catastrophic political error, with dramatic consequences for almost all sectors of human life, for society, for the State and for the countries of the South of the whole world ”.
The source
The Alliance for Human Protection, January 2021
( https://ahrp.org/german-court-in-weimar-declares-lockdown-unconstitutional )
My take on it
You might like to do what I did – take a quick look at the relevant parts of the German basic Law (https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/chancellor/basic-law-470510) . Here are the Preamble, and Articles 1 and 2:
Preamble
Conscious of their responsibility before God and man,
Inspired by the determination to promote world peace as an equal partner in a united Europe, the German people, in the exercise of their constituent power, have adopted this Basic Law.
Germans in the Länder of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Ham-burg, Hesse, Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein, and Thuringia have achieved the unity and freedom of Germany in free self- determination. This Basic Law thus applies to the entire German people.
I. Basic Rights
Article 1 [Human dignity]
(1) Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.
(2) The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world.
(3) The following basic rights shall bind the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary as directly applicable law.
Article 2 [Personal Freedoms]
(1) Every person shall have the right to free development of his personality insofar as he does not violate the rights
of others or offend against the constitutional order or the moral law.
(2) Every person shall have the right to life and physical integrity. Freedom of the person shall be inviolable. These
rights may be interfered with only pursuant to a law.
The German Basic Law dates from 1949. It was a provisional formulation by the Western Allies pending the reunification of Germany, and therefore the term ‘Constitution’ was avoided; but when reunification happened (in 1990) the German Basic Law remained in place, although it was never submitted to a popular vote.
The German Basic Law reflects the same high view of individual sovereignty that is reflected in the US Constitution and in the Constitution of Portugal (see my earlier post).
The Court found that the Administration had taken upon itself an authority reserved to the legslators.
The Court also found that (in any case) the data did not support the pretext put forward by government to justify the lock-down (and related measures). Indeed the judgment is worth reading just for the detailed data analysis on which the Court based its judgment.
The Court further found that the harmful effects of the government’s lock-down (and related) policies greatly outweighed any claimed benefit: ““There is no doubt that the number of deaths attributable to the measures of the containment policy exceeds by several times the number of deaths avoided by it.”
No doubt.
Indeed.