Legal trouble for the AfD in the state parliament: Around two dozen officials come with a search warrant. Because nothing is given to them voluntarily, they actually have to search rooms.
Munich (dpa / lby) – the police and public prosecutors searched the rooms of the AfD parliamentary group in the Bavarian state parliament on Thursday. According to the Munich I public prosecutor and the state parliament, the background to this is a criminal complaint by the state parliament office against unknown persons on suspicion of copyright infringement. According to reports, almost two dozen police officers and three prosecutors were on site. “We searched several rooms and also confiscated evidence,” said the spokeswoman for the public prosecutor’s office, Anne Leiding, of the German Press Agency. And she emphasized: “In this case, the execution of the search warrant was not averted by voluntary surrender.”
Specifically, it is about an older video published by the AfD faction on social networks. In it, statements by MPs from other parliamentary groups in a state parliament debate are said to have been distorted – because they were taken out of context.
The AfD protested sharply against the search and announced legal action. Group leader Ulrich Singer criticized that “the rooms of the members of the state parliament protected by immunity were also entered illegally”. This was an “absolutely disproportionate and undoubtedly politically motivated action against an opposition party” because of an alleged copyright infringement in a video from the state parliament. Otherwise, Singer did not go into the allegations in the message.
Singer argued, however, that “the use of a large contingent of state power” was “a substitute action after the court-ordered lifting of the surveillance by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution”.
In fact, however, such a comprehensive arrangement does not exist. In a recently published decision, the Administrative Court in Munich merely ruled that the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution may not use any intelligence resources to monitor the AfD until further notice. In addition, the state office was temporarily prohibited from “conducting public relations work with regard to possible anti-constitutional efforts by the party”. However, the observation of the AfD – as a party as a whole – on the basis of openly accessible information remains possible: the administrative court decided that the AfD had to accept being observed at least from publicly accessible sources for the time being.
In addition, it was only a so-called interim decision of the administrative court. A decision in the urgent procedure is still pending, the time for this is open.
