The German Police have carried out this Wednesday raids throughout the country against members of the protest group against the climate crisis Letzte Generation (Last Generation), whom they accuse of being part of a criminal organization. Some 170 agents have participated in the searches in 15 properties in seven German states, including Bavaria and Berlin, which have resulted in no arrests.
The Letzte Generation activists have staged dozens of protest actions in recent months in museums, airports and on the streets of cities such as Berlin, where they have paralyzed traffic by sticking to the asphalt on entrance and exit roads.
According to the Munich public prosecutor’s office, the searches have been produced at the request of the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (LKA), which is preliminary investigating “numerous criminal complaints received from the population,” he says. it’s a statement. The investigation is directed against seven people, members of the group, between the ages of 22 and 38, whom the prosecution considers suspected of “forming or supporting a criminal organization.”
The seven activists are accused of creating a donation campaign that raised 1.4 million euros to finance the group’s future legal battles. They were going to use that money to continue their protests, which range from throwing substances at famous paintings to blocking rush hour traffic to drawing attention to the climate crisis. Police have also blocked the organization’s bank accounts.
The group criticizes the lack of urgent action by the German government in the face of the climate emergency. Among their demands is a speed limit of 100 kilometers per hour on German highways —Germany is the only European country where some highway sections do not have a speed limit— and the creation of a 9-euro-per-month ticket to use public transport public.
The group’s actions have provoked different reactions among Germans. Some of support and understanding despite the inconvenience they have caused; others of rejection. In some cases, motorists have confronted activists and violently pushed them off the road themselves. Letzte Generation began to become known in Germany just before the last federal elections, in September 2021, when several of its activists began a hunger strike and camped in front of the Bundestag, the German parliament, to demand meetings with the deputies.
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The Bavarian Police, where a conservative party governs and which is going to hold elections in October, assures in its statement that two of the defendants are also suspected of having tried to sabotage the Trieste-Ingolstadt oil pipeline in April 2022. One of the records was It was produced in the apartment in the Kreuzberg neighborhood (Berlin) of one of the organization’s spokespersons, Carla Hinrichs, well known in Germany for her television appearances.
The activists strongly condemned what they described as “repression” against some of their members and announced that they will continue with their actions. In a press conference, Aimée van Baalen, the spokeswoman for the activists, called on all citizens to take part in protest marches in different German cities next week. In some, like Berlin, there were small gatherings this Wednesday, hours after the raids. “They scare us, but we should not settle in that fear,” she said, and encouraged the population to support them.
The Police also closed the group’s website, although hours later he acknowledged having been wrong. At first, the page was redirected to a police website with a notice in German and English that said: “Last Generation constitutes a criminal organization in accordance with article 129 of the Penal Code! (Attention: donations to Última Generación therefore constitute illegal support for a criminal organization!)”.
To questions from the media, a police spokesman acknowledged that it is only an initial suspicion. Public television consulted a criminal lawyer, Mark Zöller, from the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, who considered that the writing of that note was “absolutely inadmissible.”
Several prosecutors had previously studied the complaints against Letzte Generation, but until now none had considered the group suspected of being a criminal organization. In fact, the one in Berlin determined last week, after studying the group’s actions, that it is not. Experts doubt that actions such as stopping traffic at rush hour can be classified as a crime. Also the head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the German internal secret services, Thomas Haldenwang, said in mid-March that he did not consider the Letzte Generation to be an extremist group, even if some of its members could commit crimes.
The operation against the activists has already sparked a debate with different legal interpretations about the limits of civil disobedience and there are experts who say that it must be understood in a political context. The Minister of the Interior, the Social Democrat Nancy Faeser, defended the raid: “The red line in the rule of law is very clear: legitimate protest always ends when crimes are committed and the rights of others are violated,” she said: “If that red line is crossed, then the police have to act.” A few days ago, the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, described the group’s actions as “completely crazy”.
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