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Court: Train stopping “no criminal offence”
Käpt'n Bär (translated by Diet Simon) - 11.03.2004 16:32
German source story
 http://de.indymedia.org/2004/03/76680.shtml. More at www.trainstopping.de
The superior court in Celle (near Hanover) has ruled that assembly and demonstration on railway lines is not a criminal offence, but disorderly conduct.
The judgment will be welcomed by anti-nuclear activists who frequently block railway lines to hold up transports of waste, especially to the interim storage shed at Gorleben, near Celle.
No crime, says superior court. (Lüneburg Nov. 2001)
The Celle ruling overturns a conviction by a lower Lüneburg
Court for alleged disruption of public operations under §316b STGB. Celle says gathering and demonstrating on rail lines is no crime, but an infringement of the railway construction and operating regulations.
In the German source story for this translation a “Käpt'n Bär” explains the background as follows:
“In response to the massive curtailments of basic rights through assembly bans and manifold arbitrary acts of violence by police during Castor transports, citizens have increasingly conquered the railway transport routes of atomic waste as demonstration areas.
“Because ever more citizens claimed their right to demonstrate on the rails, these demonstrations became an increasing annoyance to police.
“The peaceful chaining-on action by Robin Wood near Süschendorf, in March 2001, which even forced the Castor to reverse, triggered a massive criminalisation campaign by the state. The tone was then set personally by Interior Minister [Otto] Schily [a former member of The Greens and defence attorney of “terrorists”] in that he stated publicly that this kind of peaceful protest was a serious crime.
“A few weeks later, in May 2001, Lüneburg police and state prosecutors seized on a railway track demonstration against a transport of Castor caskets to the plutonium factories in France to significantly worsen the criminalisation campaign.
“In an unprecedented manner about 50 demonstrators were locked in a garage for as long as a day and treated like heavy criminals in being registered. Many of them then received penalty notices for “Publicly hazardous disruption of public operations” under § 316b STGB! The aim was clear: Every penalty notice paid would have amounted to a legally valid conviction for this potentially terrorist crime.
“Police would have been able to spread in their propaganda that people demonstrating on the rails against Castor transports were criminals and thereby justify any violent action against them.
“Specifically and expressly as a “precedent case” the Lüneburg prosecutors had picked the proceedings against Karsten H. This second-instance conviction by the Lüneburg court has now been overturned. Costs were ordered against the state.
“The judges of the superior court in Celle state clearly that the mere stay on the rails, in this case the main Inter City route from Hamburg to Hanover, is no crime, but a disruption of public order.
“The Celle judges were unusually critical of the arguments used by Lüneburg first instance judge Wettich, who likened peaceful demonstration to a “huge boulder” being placed on the rails. “By this interpretation the verbatim words of the law were inadmissibly exaggerated,” says the Celle judgment.”
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