Michael Ejercito
2018-07-06 11:04:18 UTC
Germany: 'Decapitating' Freedom of the Press?
by Stefan Frank
July 5, 2018 at 5:00 am
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12618/germany-press-freedom
If it was indeed the authorities' plan to censor the news and keep the
information of the beheading under wraps, then it backfired. Due to the
reports about the raid, thousands of people have seen the video, and
hundreds of thousands have heard about the botched censorship attempt.
Hamburg's government is still trying to conceal the beheading. Among other
things, they [the AfD party] wanted to know whether the child had been
beheaded. The administration -- in breach of its constitutional duty --
refused to answer. It also censored the questions by blacking out whole
sentences.
Why the beheading should be kept a secret is anyone's guess. What has become
clear is how easily authorities in Germany can censor the news and punish
bloggers who spread undesired information. They have a vast toolbox of laws
at their disposal. It does not seem to bother them that the law invoked in
this case stipulates explicitly that it shall not be applied to the
"reporting of contemporary events."
In an apparent attempt to sweep under the rug a recent double homicide in
Hamburg, Germany, authorities there censored the story. They also raided the
apartments of a witness who filmed a video describing the murder, and a
blogger who posted the video on YouTube.
The murder, which made headlines worldwide, occurred on the morning of April
12. The assailant, Mourtala Madou, a 33-year-old illegal immigrant from
Niger, stabbed his German ex-girlfriend, identified as Sandra P., and their
one-year-old daughter, Miriam, at a Hamburg subway station. The child died
at the scene; her mother died later, at the hospital. The woman's
three-year-old son witnessed the murders.
According to the prosecutor's office, Madou -- who initially fled the scene,
but then called the police and was arrested shortly thereafter -- acted "out
of anger and revenge," because the day before the incident, the court had
denied him joint custody of his daughter.
It later emerged that for months Madou had been threatening to harm Sandra
P. and the baby. A senior public prosecutor told reporters that the police
investigated the woman's charges, but had concluded that the "threats were
not meant seriously" and did not pursue the case.
Furthermore, half a year earlier, in October 2017, a judge revoked a
restraining order that Sandra P. had obtained against Madou two months
earlier, on the grounds that he saw "no evidence" that Madou had threatened
her. That was when Madou's threats increased and he explicitly announced:
"I'm going to kill our daughter, and then I kill you!"
A detail of the murders that has never officially been revealed, is that
Madou apparently attempted to decapitate the baby. This detail was mentioned
by a commuter -- Ghanaese citizen Daniel J., a gospel singer at an
evangelical church in Hamburg -- who happened to arrive at the subway
station moments after the attack and filmed the scene on his phone. In the
video, police officers can be seen questioning witnesses, and paramedics are
surrounding what appears to be the baby girl. Daniel J. says, in English,
"Oh my God. It's unbelievable. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus. They cut off
the head of the baby. Oh my God. Oh Jesus."
Police question witnesses to the double-murder in Jungfernstieg subway
station in Hamburg, Germany. (Image source: Daniel J./Heinrich Kordewiner
video screenshot)
Heinrich Kordewiner, a blogger from Hamburg who discovered the video on
Daniel J.'s Facebook page, uploaded it to YouTube.
A few days later, a team of state prosecutors and officers of the cybercrime
unit of the Hamburg police arrived at Kordewiner's apartment with a search
warrant, and confiscated his computer, mobile phone and other electronics,
allegedly to find "evidence" of the "crime". He was -- and still is --
accused of: uploading the video.
Kordewiner and his flatmate told Gatestone about the raid, which took place
at 6.45 a.m. They recounted that when they first refused to open the door,
police forced it open -- and even searched the flatmate's room, although it
was apparently not covered by the search warrant.
"The police officer said that he could also search for SD (secure digital)
cards," the flatmate told Gatestone. "While he fumbled through the books on
my shelf, he suggested that he could turn my whole apartment upside down. He
told me to relax."
According to the search warrant, Kordewiner is accused of having "invaded
the private sphere" of the murder victim, in breach of §201a of Germany's
Criminal Code. This so-called "paparazzi paragraph" -- the legislation of
which was launched by Heiko Maas (currently Germany's Foreign Minister), who
as Minister of Justice was responsible for Germany's internet censorship
law -- is a barely known and rarely applied law, passed in 2015. Among other
things, it makes it illegal to take pictures that "display someone in a
helpless situation." Supposedly aimed at protecting victims of traffic
accidents from being filmed by curious onlookers, the law was already highly
controversial when it was debated in 2014, and journalist associations
criticized it for jeopardizing freedom of the press.
When the German parliament debated the law, one of the 10 experts invited to
give their opinions on the matter was Ulf Bornemann, head of the "Hate and
Incitement" department of Hamburg's public prosecution office. A former MP
and member of the East German civil rights movement, Vera Lengsfeld, wrote
at the time that Bornemann was the only one to embrace the law without
reservations: "Why," she reported he had said, "should the data of a
supposed inciter be protected?"
In a written statement, Bornemann praised the censorship law for sending "a
clear political message that the administration is willing to act against
hate crime in social networks." Bornemann was also part of the team that
raided Kordewiner's apartment.
The stated reason for the raid -- a breach of privacy rights -- is flimsy.
Only the victim's feet can be seen in the video, and even those for only a
brief moment. As the daily newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt pointed out, the
footage "is blurred, taken from a distance and doesn't allow the
identification of any person."
Meanwhile, the German publication Welt online posted a video that shows
close-up footage of the victim -- something that did not spur state
prosecutors into action. The main difference between the two videos seems to
be the verbal comment on the beheading in Daniel J's video. The alleged
breach of "privacy rights," then, would appear to be a pretext.
The "Beheading"
"We don't comment on this rumor," state prosecutor Nana Frombach said to
Gatestone when asked about the beheading. All she was willing to acknowledge
was that the child had suffered "severe neck injuries." When Gatestone said
that §201a could not be applied to the video in question because it did not
show anybody's face, she replied that this had "yet to be decided," and that
the raid was based on an "initial suspicion." Gatestone then mentioned that
Kordewiner, instead of uploading the video anonymously (which would have
been easy for him to do), had uploaded it to his YouTube channel, along with
his full name and address, rendering the raid's stated goal of "finding
evidence" not merely disproportionate but entirely unnecessary. Frombach
said that she was not allowed to "comment on details of an ongoing
investigation," but that she could "guarantee" that the search warrant had
been "approved by a judge."
How can any journalist, under such censorship, report the news? Would it be
illegal to film the scene of a terrorist attack? Frombach said that she
could "not tell" whether this would still be legal in today's Germany. "I
can only judge specific cases, not ones that lie in the future," she said.
The libertarian website Achse des Guten (Axis of the Good) was the first
media outlet to report the raid. Two days later, the daily Hamburger
Abendblatt wrote:
"Hamburg's state prosecutor rabidly prosecutes a blogger who has published
pictures of the tragedy at Jungfernstieg... The raid was based on paragraph
201a, a law that the council of the press and journalist associations view
as being problematic with regard to free reporting."
The Abendblatt criticized the "nebulous phrasing" of the law and the "even
more nebulous interpretation by the state prosecutor," stating, "The law
stipulates that no pictures of helpless persons may be taken. However, the
cell phone footage does not show such persons."
According to the Abendblatt, sources "from within the security apparatus"
had been "surprised" by the raids of the homes of the blogger and Daniel J.
The state prosecutor who ordered the raids had been "very hot on this case,"
these sources said, and was "shooting out of cannons into sparrows... it is
surprising how quickly the search warrant was issued, given the high
obstacles we face every day, even when dealing with serious crime."
In an accompanying comment, Abendblatt editor Matthias Iken called the raid
"foolish," because "it supports the conspiracy theories of right-wingers."
Where, he asked, "do the prohibitions start? And where do they stop?"
In the meantime, the incriminated video has been deleted from all German
websites and YouTube channels (although it can still be found on websites
that are out of reach of the German authorities).
Censorship Backfired
If it was indeed the authorities' plan to censor the news and keep the
information of the beheading under wraps, then it backfired. Due to the
reports about the raid, thousands of people have seen the video, and
hundreds of thousands have heard about the botched censorship attempt. Even
worse for the would-be censors, they unwittingly revealed the very detail
that they wanted to keep from the public. This is because the search
warrant -- a copy of which was handed to Kordewiner -- happens to provide a
detailed account of the murders. It elaborates that Madou had "wanted to
punish the mother of the child" and "enforce his claim to power and
ownership." With an "intent to kill," Madou "suddenly" took a "knife from
the backpack he was carrying, stabbed the child in the belly and then almost
completely cut through the neck."
The office of the state prosecutor is under the authority of Hamburg's state
government, a coalition of Social Democrats and the Green Party. The state's
Minister of Justice, Till Steffen, is a member of the Green Party and has
for years been accused of being behind many scandals in his ministry. Among
these are that alleged murderers repeatedly have had to be released from
pre-trial detention because their trials have taken too long. In 2016,
Steffen prevented police from sharing pictures of the Berlin truck
terrorist, Anis Amri when he was still at large, out of fear that sharing
images of jihadist terror suspects could incite racial hatred.
Censorship in Parliament
Hamburg's government is still trying to conceal the beheading. This became
clear when, in May, MPs of the anti-immigration party Alternative for
Germany (AfD) made a parliamentary enquiry about the police raid and details
of the murder case. Among other things, they wanted to know whether the
child had been beheaded. The administration -- in breach of its
constitutional duty -- refused to answer. It also censored the questions by
blacking out whole sentences. The newspaper Die Welt noted: "That the text
of an enquiry and the questions are blackened out without consultation" is
something "that almost never happens."
When Gatestone contacted Alexander Wolf, one of the MPs who made the
enquiry, to find out what exactly was censored, he sent the original enquiry
(the first two pages from the left) as well as the senate's answer (pages 3,
4 and 5) in which parts of the questions were censored. Every hint of a
beheading that might have taken place was blacked out, as was the link to
the article that first broke the news about the beheading and the subsequent
police raid. Wolf told Gatestone:
"In the session of the interior committee, the Senator of the Interior and
the responsible state prosecutor both replied very evasively to the repeated
questions of our speaker, Dirk Nockemann, and imputed a lack of respect [for
the murder victim]. In my opinion, this was designed to cause indignation
against the enquirer on the part of the other MPs. Apparently, the Senator
wants to sweep the issue under the rug."
The speakers of the other opposition parties were also contacted by
Gatestone: Dennis Gladiator of the Christian-Democrats (CDU) and Anna von
Treuenfels-Frowein of the centrist Free Democrat Party (FDP).
Treuenfeld-Frowein replied:
"Of course, the public has a right to information. But for us as a party
committed to the rule of law, personal rights do not end with death. We
therefore consider the decision to black out parts of the enquiry to be
appropriate. Right now, there is no need to make details of the crime
public."
Gladiator did not respond to Gatestone's repeated requests for comment.
Why the beheading should be kept a secret is anyone's guess. What has become
clear is how easily authorities in Germany can censor the news and punish
bloggers who spread undesired information. They have a vast toolbox of laws
at their disposal. It does not seem to bother them that the law invoked in
this case stipulates explicitly that it shall not be applied to the
"reporting of contemporary events." The state prosecutor, however, argues
that this murder case – which was reported, among others, in France, India,
Pakistan, South Africa and the United States – does not constitute such a
"contemporary event."
"For Hamburg's ministry of justice," the Abendblatt wrote, "the double
murder is a crime of passion that must not be of any interest to the
public."
Stefan Frank is a journalist and author based in Germany.
Follow Stefan Frank on Twitter
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by Stefan Frank
July 5, 2018 at 5:00 am
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12618/germany-press-freedom
If it was indeed the authorities' plan to censor the news and keep the
information of the beheading under wraps, then it backfired. Due to the
reports about the raid, thousands of people have seen the video, and
hundreds of thousands have heard about the botched censorship attempt.
Hamburg's government is still trying to conceal the beheading. Among other
things, they [the AfD party] wanted to know whether the child had been
beheaded. The administration -- in breach of its constitutional duty --
refused to answer. It also censored the questions by blacking out whole
sentences.
Why the beheading should be kept a secret is anyone's guess. What has become
clear is how easily authorities in Germany can censor the news and punish
bloggers who spread undesired information. They have a vast toolbox of laws
at their disposal. It does not seem to bother them that the law invoked in
this case stipulates explicitly that it shall not be applied to the
"reporting of contemporary events."
In an apparent attempt to sweep under the rug a recent double homicide in
Hamburg, Germany, authorities there censored the story. They also raided the
apartments of a witness who filmed a video describing the murder, and a
blogger who posted the video on YouTube.
The murder, which made headlines worldwide, occurred on the morning of April
12. The assailant, Mourtala Madou, a 33-year-old illegal immigrant from
Niger, stabbed his German ex-girlfriend, identified as Sandra P., and their
one-year-old daughter, Miriam, at a Hamburg subway station. The child died
at the scene; her mother died later, at the hospital. The woman's
three-year-old son witnessed the murders.
According to the prosecutor's office, Madou -- who initially fled the scene,
but then called the police and was arrested shortly thereafter -- acted "out
of anger and revenge," because the day before the incident, the court had
denied him joint custody of his daughter.
It later emerged that for months Madou had been threatening to harm Sandra
P. and the baby. A senior public prosecutor told reporters that the police
investigated the woman's charges, but had concluded that the "threats were
not meant seriously" and did not pursue the case.
Furthermore, half a year earlier, in October 2017, a judge revoked a
restraining order that Sandra P. had obtained against Madou two months
earlier, on the grounds that he saw "no evidence" that Madou had threatened
her. That was when Madou's threats increased and he explicitly announced:
"I'm going to kill our daughter, and then I kill you!"
A detail of the murders that has never officially been revealed, is that
Madou apparently attempted to decapitate the baby. This detail was mentioned
by a commuter -- Ghanaese citizen Daniel J., a gospel singer at an
evangelical church in Hamburg -- who happened to arrive at the subway
station moments after the attack and filmed the scene on his phone. In the
video, police officers can be seen questioning witnesses, and paramedics are
surrounding what appears to be the baby girl. Daniel J. says, in English,
"Oh my God. It's unbelievable. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus. They cut off
the head of the baby. Oh my God. Oh Jesus."
Police question witnesses to the double-murder in Jungfernstieg subway
station in Hamburg, Germany. (Image source: Daniel J./Heinrich Kordewiner
video screenshot)
Heinrich Kordewiner, a blogger from Hamburg who discovered the video on
Daniel J.'s Facebook page, uploaded it to YouTube.
A few days later, a team of state prosecutors and officers of the cybercrime
unit of the Hamburg police arrived at Kordewiner's apartment with a search
warrant, and confiscated his computer, mobile phone and other electronics,
allegedly to find "evidence" of the "crime". He was -- and still is --
accused of: uploading the video.
Kordewiner and his flatmate told Gatestone about the raid, which took place
at 6.45 a.m. They recounted that when they first refused to open the door,
police forced it open -- and even searched the flatmate's room, although it
was apparently not covered by the search warrant.
"The police officer said that he could also search for SD (secure digital)
cards," the flatmate told Gatestone. "While he fumbled through the books on
my shelf, he suggested that he could turn my whole apartment upside down. He
told me to relax."
According to the search warrant, Kordewiner is accused of having "invaded
the private sphere" of the murder victim, in breach of §201a of Germany's
Criminal Code. This so-called "paparazzi paragraph" -- the legislation of
which was launched by Heiko Maas (currently Germany's Foreign Minister), who
as Minister of Justice was responsible for Germany's internet censorship
law -- is a barely known and rarely applied law, passed in 2015. Among other
things, it makes it illegal to take pictures that "display someone in a
helpless situation." Supposedly aimed at protecting victims of traffic
accidents from being filmed by curious onlookers, the law was already highly
controversial when it was debated in 2014, and journalist associations
criticized it for jeopardizing freedom of the press.
When the German parliament debated the law, one of the 10 experts invited to
give their opinions on the matter was Ulf Bornemann, head of the "Hate and
Incitement" department of Hamburg's public prosecution office. A former MP
and member of the East German civil rights movement, Vera Lengsfeld, wrote
at the time that Bornemann was the only one to embrace the law without
reservations: "Why," she reported he had said, "should the data of a
supposed inciter be protected?"
In a written statement, Bornemann praised the censorship law for sending "a
clear political message that the administration is willing to act against
hate crime in social networks." Bornemann was also part of the team that
raided Kordewiner's apartment.
The stated reason for the raid -- a breach of privacy rights -- is flimsy.
Only the victim's feet can be seen in the video, and even those for only a
brief moment. As the daily newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt pointed out, the
footage "is blurred, taken from a distance and doesn't allow the
identification of any person."
Meanwhile, the German publication Welt online posted a video that shows
close-up footage of the victim -- something that did not spur state
prosecutors into action. The main difference between the two videos seems to
be the verbal comment on the beheading in Daniel J's video. The alleged
breach of "privacy rights," then, would appear to be a pretext.
The "Beheading"
"We don't comment on this rumor," state prosecutor Nana Frombach said to
Gatestone when asked about the beheading. All she was willing to acknowledge
was that the child had suffered "severe neck injuries." When Gatestone said
that §201a could not be applied to the video in question because it did not
show anybody's face, she replied that this had "yet to be decided," and that
the raid was based on an "initial suspicion." Gatestone then mentioned that
Kordewiner, instead of uploading the video anonymously (which would have
been easy for him to do), had uploaded it to his YouTube channel, along with
his full name and address, rendering the raid's stated goal of "finding
evidence" not merely disproportionate but entirely unnecessary. Frombach
said that she was not allowed to "comment on details of an ongoing
investigation," but that she could "guarantee" that the search warrant had
been "approved by a judge."
How can any journalist, under such censorship, report the news? Would it be
illegal to film the scene of a terrorist attack? Frombach said that she
could "not tell" whether this would still be legal in today's Germany. "I
can only judge specific cases, not ones that lie in the future," she said.
The libertarian website Achse des Guten (Axis of the Good) was the first
media outlet to report the raid. Two days later, the daily Hamburger
Abendblatt wrote:
"Hamburg's state prosecutor rabidly prosecutes a blogger who has published
pictures of the tragedy at Jungfernstieg... The raid was based on paragraph
201a, a law that the council of the press and journalist associations view
as being problematic with regard to free reporting."
The Abendblatt criticized the "nebulous phrasing" of the law and the "even
more nebulous interpretation by the state prosecutor," stating, "The law
stipulates that no pictures of helpless persons may be taken. However, the
cell phone footage does not show such persons."
According to the Abendblatt, sources "from within the security apparatus"
had been "surprised" by the raids of the homes of the blogger and Daniel J.
The state prosecutor who ordered the raids had been "very hot on this case,"
these sources said, and was "shooting out of cannons into sparrows... it is
surprising how quickly the search warrant was issued, given the high
obstacles we face every day, even when dealing with serious crime."
In an accompanying comment, Abendblatt editor Matthias Iken called the raid
"foolish," because "it supports the conspiracy theories of right-wingers."
Where, he asked, "do the prohibitions start? And where do they stop?"
In the meantime, the incriminated video has been deleted from all German
websites and YouTube channels (although it can still be found on websites
that are out of reach of the German authorities).
Censorship Backfired
If it was indeed the authorities' plan to censor the news and keep the
information of the beheading under wraps, then it backfired. Due to the
reports about the raid, thousands of people have seen the video, and
hundreds of thousands have heard about the botched censorship attempt. Even
worse for the would-be censors, they unwittingly revealed the very detail
that they wanted to keep from the public. This is because the search
warrant -- a copy of which was handed to Kordewiner -- happens to provide a
detailed account of the murders. It elaborates that Madou had "wanted to
punish the mother of the child" and "enforce his claim to power and
ownership." With an "intent to kill," Madou "suddenly" took a "knife from
the backpack he was carrying, stabbed the child in the belly and then almost
completely cut through the neck."
The office of the state prosecutor is under the authority of Hamburg's state
government, a coalition of Social Democrats and the Green Party. The state's
Minister of Justice, Till Steffen, is a member of the Green Party and has
for years been accused of being behind many scandals in his ministry. Among
these are that alleged murderers repeatedly have had to be released from
pre-trial detention because their trials have taken too long. In 2016,
Steffen prevented police from sharing pictures of the Berlin truck
terrorist, Anis Amri when he was still at large, out of fear that sharing
images of jihadist terror suspects could incite racial hatred.
Censorship in Parliament
Hamburg's government is still trying to conceal the beheading. This became
clear when, in May, MPs of the anti-immigration party Alternative for
Germany (AfD) made a parliamentary enquiry about the police raid and details
of the murder case. Among other things, they wanted to know whether the
child had been beheaded. The administration -- in breach of its
constitutional duty -- refused to answer. It also censored the questions by
blacking out whole sentences. The newspaper Die Welt noted: "That the text
of an enquiry and the questions are blackened out without consultation" is
something "that almost never happens."
When Gatestone contacted Alexander Wolf, one of the MPs who made the
enquiry, to find out what exactly was censored, he sent the original enquiry
(the first two pages from the left) as well as the senate's answer (pages 3,
4 and 5) in which parts of the questions were censored. Every hint of a
beheading that might have taken place was blacked out, as was the link to
the article that first broke the news about the beheading and the subsequent
police raid. Wolf told Gatestone:
"In the session of the interior committee, the Senator of the Interior and
the responsible state prosecutor both replied very evasively to the repeated
questions of our speaker, Dirk Nockemann, and imputed a lack of respect [for
the murder victim]. In my opinion, this was designed to cause indignation
against the enquirer on the part of the other MPs. Apparently, the Senator
wants to sweep the issue under the rug."
The speakers of the other opposition parties were also contacted by
Gatestone: Dennis Gladiator of the Christian-Democrats (CDU) and Anna von
Treuenfels-Frowein of the centrist Free Democrat Party (FDP).
Treuenfeld-Frowein replied:
"Of course, the public has a right to information. But for us as a party
committed to the rule of law, personal rights do not end with death. We
therefore consider the decision to black out parts of the enquiry to be
appropriate. Right now, there is no need to make details of the crime
public."
Gladiator did not respond to Gatestone's repeated requests for comment.
Why the beheading should be kept a secret is anyone's guess. What has become
clear is how easily authorities in Germany can censor the news and punish
bloggers who spread undesired information. They have a vast toolbox of laws
at their disposal. It does not seem to bother them that the law invoked in
this case stipulates explicitly that it shall not be applied to the
"reporting of contemporary events." The state prosecutor, however, argues
that this murder case – which was reported, among others, in France, India,
Pakistan, South Africa and the United States – does not constitute such a
"contemporary event."
"For Hamburg's ministry of justice," the Abendblatt wrote, "the double
murder is a crime of passion that must not be of any interest to the
public."
Stefan Frank is a journalist and author based in Germany.
Follow Stefan Frank on Twitter
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