With the headline “Defensive Democracy: Stop Höcke!” A petition on the “Campact” platform calls for the basic rights of Thuringian AfD leader Björn Höcke to be withdrawn. The campaign is explicitly aimed at Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the parliamentary group leaders of the SPD, Union, Greens, FDP and Left. The authors of the petition call on the federal government to file “an application for forfeiture of fundamental rights under Article 18 of the Basic Law” against Höcke. More than 800,000 people have already signed the online petition (as of Monday, 11:15 a.m.). But does such a demand have any chance of success? Can German citizens actually be deprived of the basic rights enshrined in the Basic Law?
In fact, according to Article 18 of the Basic Law, it is possible to deprive individual citizens of basic rights. This would be justified by the so-called “forfeiture of fundamental rights”. The article was deliberately included by the fathers of the Basic Law in order to defend themselves against individual enemies of the free-democratic basic order. The law can be used against entire parties at the federal or state level, as well as against individuals.
The text of the law states: “Anyone who abuses the freedom of expression, in particular freedom of the press, freedom of teaching, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, the secrecy of letters, mail and telecommunications, property or the right to asylum to fight against the free democratic basic order, forfeits it these fundamental rights.” The Federal Constitutional Court would decide on the extent and duration of the forfeiture based on the application, which can be made by the federal government, the Bundestag or a state government.
The forfeiture of fundamental rights would be the basis for Höcke to lose his active and passive right to vote by means of Section 39 Paragraph 2 of the Federal Constitutional Court Act. This would mean that he would be eliminated as the top candidate and would not be able to cast his vote as a voter.
This is exactly what needs to happen “so that Björn Höcke cannot cause any further damage to liberal democracy,” according to the authors of the petition. This is important with a view to the state elections in Thuringia next September. According to the survey, the AfD led by Höcke, which the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution lists as “certainly right-wing extremist”, would currently be the strongest force.
Since the founding of the Federal Republic, there has never been a case of judged forfeiture of fundamental rights. According to the “Frankfurter Rundschau”, there have so far been four targeted cases, each of which was dropped because they were no longer (or no longer) proven dangerous:
In 1960, proceedings were directed against the deputy head of the Socialist Reich Party, Otto Ernst Remer. The party saw itself as following in the tradition of the NSDAP and was banned in 1952. The federal government’s proceedings against Remer were discontinued because he withdrew from politics after his party was banned and his “dangerousness could therefore not be determined.”
In 1974, the application to revoke the voting rights of the former editor of the Deutsche Nationalzeitung, Gerhard Frey, and to dissolve the newspaper publisher failed. The federal government justified this with the racist, anti-Semitic and nationalist content of the newspaper. The Federal Constitutional Court rejected the application because it assessed the influence of the newspaper as “too small”.
The most recent examples of an application date from 1996. After the murder attacks in Mölln in 1992, the then Federal Minister of the Interior Rudolf Seiters requested a deprivation of fundamental rights for the two neo-Nazis Thomas Dienel and Heinz Reisz. However, the second Senate rejected the application because both of their prison sentences were suspended due to positive prognosis.
In addition to the high hurdles of determining dangerousness, another factor could also thwart the petition authors’ plans: In the past, an average of four years passed between the submission of an application for infringement of fundamental rights and the judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court. In the Höcke case, this process should take less than nine months.
Source: Basic Law, Frankfurter Rundschau, Campact petition
