Nittmann case in its decisive phase

The case of Dr. Nittmann – the plaintiff who took legal measures against the unconstitutional deduction of church tax from unemployed non-church members, is now entering its fourth year – that's a lot of time, and time isn't only money, it's life too! During this time, not only has Iraq been butchered and countless of its people slaughtered, but hundreds of thousands of unemployed Germans, who have the right of repayment of the money stolen from them in the form of &»church tax«, have been held up, subjected to delaying tactics, fobbed off and generally wound up. This trial, representative of all the others, has proved one thing for sure: the German judges, no matter what rank, couldn't care less about the constitutional regulations regarding equal treatment and freedom of religion.
     That is nothing new in itself, but it is far from being the only thing. A certain unease has crept into the legal machinery, whose only function is the slow, uniform grinding down of people, where every justified legal claim gets stuck like a fly on flypaper and finally perishes. The routine operation has started stumbling a little; the cogs aren't quite fitting properly, bands are tearing here and there and headquarters is having to send out repairmen with increasing frequency. The troublesome disturbance that the rulers must keep down is publicity – generated by us in more than three years of hard and costly work. It's time for a synopsis.
     During this time, more than 2000 written protests have been sent to the courts involved in Dr. Nittmann's case – not only from Germany, but, extremely importantly, from abroad as well: Italy, Spain, France, England, Slovakia, India, the USA, Canada, Australia, Nepal... The tenor of these protests was partly a demand addressed to the courts to finally start following the constitutional regulations, and also to abolish the Hitler concordat and, based on it, other stinking relics from the Middle Ages that form the basis of the relatively ugly special position of the German Church State in comparison to other nations.
     The reference to the unconstitutionality of these state and clerical raids on the poorest and therefore most susceptible to pressure was not only a disturbance, it also forced the state courts to reveal those universally over-subtle and windy constructions, devoid of any legal foundation, with whose help the corresponding articles of the Basic Law have been being broken to date. For example, it turned out that the deduction of church tax from wages and salaries is far from »usual«, as the courts' monotonous drones would have us believe, but that – and this was in 1999 – 43 % of employed Germans did not belong to a major Christian church. Finding out this figure, which has been protected like a state secret, was not easy, but now, because it had been made public in mass flyers, the press had to jump into the breach and, in the style of the work that has been apportioned to them and which they have been practising for decades, print the odd statistic here and there, accompanied by all kinds of mendacious assertions, appeasing statements and distracting irrelevancies. The legal apparatus, now under pressure, saw itself forced to present the term »usual« in numbers and therefore decreed, in the familiar mixture of arbitrariness and contradiction, that the deduction could be deemed »usual« up to a margin of 55 % of those in employment paying church tax. And a sole judge at the lowest instance in Chemnitz was even allowed to pronounce a (correct) verdict and confirm to a handful of unemployed that they had wrongly had church tax deducted from them – but without being able to repay them and without any further consequences for the numerous other proceedings and the wrong being practised as a matter of course.
     But at least the Moloch Church State had to get itself moving. The number of employed church members had decreased to below the 55% arbitrarily chosen by the authorities by 2001 at the latest, and now it was a matter of playing for time, delaying the provision of reliable statistics, reversing the onus of proof and putting the burden of statistical proof on the unemployed lodging the claims – this alone is an outrage and just one example of the unclean mechanisms of an unclean state. But now it was no longer as easy and less and less opportune to treat the unemployed non-church members as the Church did with the Jews in the Middle Ages, and so the government surreptitiously had the officialese slogan »deductions usually payable« on unemployment benefit deleted from the law effective as of 1 January 2005, which means that the deduction of church tax has ceased (however, this is in conjunction with a disgusting transitory regulation according to which the unemployment benefit of those non-church members who lost their jobs before 1.1.2005 is generally not recalculated: in other words they are still having to pay the enforced church tax!). It is worthy of note that the announcement of this measure coincided precisely with that of the verdict of the state on the case of Dr. Nittmann (and was implemented just a few months later as part of »Hartz III« but was, however, postponed as long as possible – until said date of 1 January 2005) – garnished at the time with the big-mouthed and hypocritical statement of an SPD functionary »so there'll be more money in your wallet«, meaning the unemployed (cf. Ketzerbriefe 120). And now – not even one year has passed and it is exactly these unemployed who are being robbed blind by the Hartz law; and what Schröder's robber state has been losing out on with the unconstitutional church tax since January 2005 it has been grabbing with both hands with other plundering actions. And what is also worthy of note is the not so small and unspoken scurrilous remark that now every unemployed church member is also benefiting from this change in the law – the decision to leave the church, so important because it increases the self-respect of the individual who does so, must on no account be linked to an advantage! And finally: this silent withdrawal by the government, first announced with a patronising undertone, then presented coolly, as if it were an aside, is intended to conceal the fact that the church tax in recent years, the articles in the constitution aside, was even illegal when only taking into account the arbitrary legal conditions (55 %) and those who have had money stolen from them therefore have a right to compensation, i.e. the repayment of the stolen money. This disgrace of imposing special taxes on non-church members has been secretly dropped and now it's being presented as if nothing had ever happened – the German Church State must not be allowed to get off so lightly this time. The primary demand must therefore be: Pay the money stolen from the unemployed in the form of church tax back to them!
     The Federal Constitutional Court, which is now brooding over its decision (what is there to actually brood over for so long?!), will undertake everything it can think of to talk itself out of this very point. And what's more, it has already taken precautionary measures in case the superior European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg should instruct the German legal system to adhere to its own constitution in regard to the unconstitutional deduction of church tax. As a reminder: every German citizen who sees himself as having had his rights violated and fails to have this recognised at a national court level can lodge a claim at the European Court of Human Rights, and the European states – now numbering over 40 – have in turn committed themselves by contract and signature to following its verdicts and rulings. And now, all of a sudden, that isn't really how it was meant at all. Let us take a closer look at this point; it is a lesson in civics, or, to put it more precisely, a lesson about how thoroughly the neo-totalitarian German state has made breaking the law a system (and not only the German state, of course, because it is also mostly a 'role model' for the EU, but apart from France, which creates enough injustices off its own bat, the rest of the EU trundles along behind it at varying speeds).
     In recent months we have frequently heard about »tensions« between the European Court of Human Rights and the German government, or the legal apparatus. But this was in no way, as one might expect, about flagrant and conspicuous violations of the constitution by the German government such as the violation of Article 26 of the German Basic Law in the case of the war on the Yugoslavian republic in 1999 or the active support of the wars of aggression on Afghanistan in 2001 and most recently on Iraq. No – no Chancellor and none of his ministers were prosecuted for deploying and stationing German troops in foreign countries – on US orders but against the express letter of the constitution – without even the merest hint that any of these foreign countries had any intention of attacking Germany. Then, and only then, would the deployment of German troops have been legal. The tensions referred to more banal matters such as the rights of princesses to their own pictures – of course they should have that in the face of sneaky, disgusting paparazzi – or the custody rights of single fathers regarding their children – which should be equally self-explanatory; what was more serious was the disregard of the land reform in the former East Germany by the German Federal Government and the enforced expropriation of 50,000-70,000 former GDR citizens that took place during the annexation – this issue is at least about amounts in millions. But that alone is not the deciding factor: most of the wrong cannot be measured merely in terms of the material damage done to the victim. (But just imagine if an internationally recognised foreign court, such as a League of Nations had, in 1938, ordered Hitler to return the property that had been gradually taken from the Jews to them: the National Socialist government would not have acknowledged this ruling, rejecting it as »interference in German affairs«, but the mass destruction of the Jews would have been a little more difficult, since the removal of their rights would have taken a little longer; there is evidence of similar processes). One decisive aspect in wrong committed by the state is, however, the baseness of the motive, the moral depravity: a pauper steals from necessity, but for representatives of a state who also decide on how much they themselves take and whose actions are subject to publicly known guidelines there should be a considerably harsher punishment in the event of the same delict and the simultaneous violation of the constitutional articles that bind them. So once again, this is about the question of whether the German state – let us wallow, for a second, in the fiction of its sovereignty; in any case, it is not, in the question that is of interest here, subject to any reprisals from its American master – is respecting the basic principles it has set for itself (the constitution) and the international treaties it has entered into. And now, all of a sudden, with a nudge and a wink, it says: maybe, but more likely not.
     And what is this about, concretely? Needless to say, the princesses and single fathers are just decoys; their upvaluation in propaganda terms is in any case definitely under suspicion of giving individual complaints lodged at the European Court of Human Rights a touch of the absurd or exotic. When Robber Chancellor Schröder lets the highest European court know that he does not feel »bound to [their] verdict« (he can feel what he wants, but this is of no relevance here), and when the BVG emphasises that the verdicts from Strasbourg are only to be considered »insofar as German law allows it« (Spiegel 15.11.2004), then that means that the violation of the constitution is to be secured preventatively in the future, made a part of the government's agenda, if you like – for the European Court in Strasbourg has no other function than to verify if the laws in the European member states – such as in Germany with the until recently valid law on the enforced deduction of church tax from unemployed non-church members – violate the basic rights that are guaranteed by the European Human Rights Convention and the German constitution. In this context it was very noticeable how the »Spiegel« journalists attacked the President of the European Court, the Swiss Professor Luzius Wildhaber – who is certainly not radical but at least has the tendency to think in terms of state law and order – like stuck pigs: instead of getting involved in German affairs, they venomously notified him that he would be better off looking after Turkey or Russia (who are still not even members!) – they, after all, needed looking after more. So there really must be something at stake if German journalists set to with such a characteristic mixture of cynicism and threatening gestures: Schröder's robber state is trying to take precautions against international condemnation, particularly since the wrong they have committed is in the unbroken tradition of fascism as is the case with Hitler's concordat with the Vatican and the laws derived from this. The relationship of the German government to the Strasbourg Court is, of course, of a selective and tactical nature: when the court's verdicts suit the government and take away its responsibility for unpopular actions, they are publicised and propagated with great rapidity and persistent official efficiency in order to cover up, and above all to continue, a constitutional violation (such as was the case many years ago with the scandalous and unconstitutional berufsverbots, against which the victims vainly filed complaints in Strasbourg). But if a stinking piece of Hitlerism and Middle Ages is being examined, the church state rears up and bares its teeth: national laws are then, all of a sudden, to be placed above the original human rights (i.e. those of 1789) and the obligations that have been agreed on internationally.
     As far as we know, the »Nittmann case« is the only potential lawsuit for the European Court that is already, before the start of the proceedings, known to the international public – the numerous protest letters prove this. But the highest organs of the state – the government and Federal Constitutional Court and the government-influenced press in the form of the 'Spiegel' – do not announce that they are going to ignore the verdicts of the court at Strasbourg for nothing. So the protest from abroad has had the desired effect – this is shown in the change to the law regarding unemployment benefit, effective since January 2005, this is shown in the reaction to the feared reprimand from Strasbourg, a mixture of threatening growls and nervousness. The decisive conclusion to be drawn from this is: states that act unlawfully are especially sensitive to pain when it comes to public attentions, and the Nittmann case has clearly reached this threshold. For this reason every protest letter counts and is particularly important when it is addressed to the highest court in Germany (please send a copy to us):