Analysis of the rejected urgent application against the Climate Protection Act

The Federal Constitutional Court has rejected a CDU MP’s urgent application for the climate protection law. The vote in the Bundestag on Friday can therefore take place today as planned. But how was the decision justified?

The MP Thomas Heilmann (CDU) wanted the Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) to declare that his rights as a MP under the Basic Law were violated because there was not enough time to discuss and deal with the new climate protection law. This application was combined with an urgent application (application for an interim order) to stop the vote in the Bundestag on Friday.

In order for such an urgent application to be successful, a plaintiff must always justify, regardless of the specific case, why his main application has at least a certain chance of success. Heilmann’s urgent application fails at this first hurdle.

No substantive justification for the emergency decision

The court justified the rejection of the urgent application in its decision in the evening with a single sentence. “The application for an interim injunction is rejected because the application in the main matter is currently inadmissible from the outset.” Justifications for urgent decisions are often very short or are sometimes only given in full later. This one sentence still sounds cryptic. A translation could be something like: Heilmann’s goal of having the court find that his rights as a member of parliament have been violated currently has little chance of success.

In other cases, lawsuits in Karlsruhe often fail at the hurdle of “admissibility” if the plaintiffs have not adequately justified their concerns in the pleadings. The word “currently” in the current decision could suggest that the failure here was at this point.

And that there is still room for improvement when it comes to justification, so Heilmann could provide the court with arguments for his main application so that the court could subsequently decide whether his rights as a member of parliament were violated. That’s not certain. However, this would not change the rejected emergency motion and the possible vote in the Bundestag.

No stop like the “Heating Act”

Last summer, Heilmann made an urgent application in Karlsruhe to get more consultation time for MPs on the heating law. In this specific case, the BVerfG considered a slight postponement of the vote to be bearable. But it was already emphasized at the time that it only intervened in the Bundestag’s proceedings through emergency decisions in very exceptional cases.

The court also showed a certain skepticism about this issue in the hearing on the new electoral law on Tuesday. There, too, the plaintiffs from Union and Die Linke claimed that they had been “taken by surprise” in the legislative process because there was not enough time. However, the questions from the judge’s bench revealed a tendency towards reticence on this point. In any case, the current decision shows, even without a known reason: not every urgent application with the argument “not enough time for consultation” is automatically successful again in Karlsruhe.

It was about the process, not the content

Ultimately, the important thing is that this was only about the procedure in the Bundestag for voting on the climate protection law, i.e. whether the MPs had enough time to discuss it. In its emergency decision, the court did not examine the new content of the Climate Protection Act and said nothing about it. It could only do this if there were lawsuits against this law after the climate protection law was passed.

File number: 2 BvE 3/24