This court decision on the climate stickers is pure mockery

In the middle of the discussion about harsher penalties for militant climate protection activists, a decision by the Berlin District Court points in exactly the opposite direction. The decision, which WELT has received, even rejects the imposition of a fine on an activist of the "last generation" who was stuck at an intersection in Friedrichshain for several hours and caused a traffic jam almost two kilometers long.

It is indeed easy to argue that simply sticking to oneself does not mean resistance to law enforcement officials. The reasoning, which also denies coercion of the motorists concerned, reads from their perspective as mockery: The activists did not announce the time and place of the blockade, but their general intention to carry out such actions in the city, so that motorists yes could have switched to public transport as a precaution.

Following this logic, they would have to do this practically continuously in view of the frequent traffic blockages since the beginning of the year, which should be in the spirit of the "last generation" - and apparently also in the sense of the single judge who issued the decision.

Although he repeatedly emphasizes that it is not important to what extent he himself “considers the goals or actions of the demonstrators … useful or valuable”, he then takes their side so comprehensively and one-sidedly that there can be no doubt about it. The only hair-raising comment is that the intersection is in a "generally known, heavily frequented traffic area" where "traffic jams are to be expected regularly, even without political action".

Apart from the fact that traffic jams of this length and duration are by no means common, this argument could even be used to excuse the spilling of oil or nails on the motorway, because traffic accidents still happen there without them.

The "admittedly very annoying" consequences of being stuck for several hours are briefly mentioned, but in a perfect perpetrator-victim reversal, they are immediately offset against the behavior of the motorists, who "are significantly involved in the consumption of oil and are therefore part of the climate problem."

One might almost want to ask what kind of fuel and how many degrees some judges use to heat their home office, and whether they would react to blockages in front of their front door with the same gratitude that the decision suggests to drivers who, after all, are aware of the consequences of climate change are affected and “for which – seen in this way – the demonstrators are demonstrating”.

The fact that the “legitimate exercise” of the activists’ right to freedom of assembly “by far” outweighs the “only relatively slightly limited fundamental rights concerns” of the vehicle drivers has fortunately been an individual and outsider’s opinion and in no way an expression of general doubts in the Berlin judiciary.

This was the impression conveyed by an article in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", which was the first to report on the decision, which had been made at the beginning of October, with obvious sympathy. When asked, the Berlin district court responsible for the blockades made it clear that the numbers given in the text are sometimes misleading: Of 174 penal order applications from the public prosecutor's office, "only one case" has so far been rejected. Of course, this will soon be corrected in the appeals court.