A good year after the end of the last Bavarian rules to protect against Corona, only a few people in the Free State have received refunds for unjustified fines. By the beginning of February, the district governments had approved 31 corresponding applications, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Munich told the German Press Agency. In total, the Free State has so far had to pay back around 5,300 euros.
This concerns fines for violations of an exit restriction at the beginning of the corona pandemic, which the Federal Administrative Court later declared to be disproportionate and therefore ineffective. In this context, only one application for a refund was still open and 638 had been processed.
The corresponding regulation is not the only Corona rule in the Free State that has been challenged by the courts. Among other things, last year the Bavarian Administrative Court subsequently declared a quarantine requirement when returning from Corona risk areas from 2020 to be ineffective. However, the judgment is not yet legally binding. The state government has lodged an appeal with the Federal Administrative Court; a hearing date there is still pending.
The Free State’s Corona rules often kept the Bavarian Administrative Court busy even after they expired on March 1, 2023. According to the Ministry of Health, a total of 441 applications have been submitted so far to have Bavarian regulations examined by the courts. Only six of them have been successful so far, three of which involved the closure of leisure businesses at the beginning of the pandemic. In the case of entry quarantine, the final decision is still pending.
“People’s health has always been the benchmark and goal of government action,” said a ministry spokesman. “As a result, a large number of court decisions have confirmed that the path taken was legally compliant.” The majority of applications (290) were either rejected or withdrawn or were “disposed of in another way”. However, a further 115 applications have not yet been decided.