The incidence numbers are rising again, but the number of people vaccinated is stagnating. So it cannot be ruled out that Germany may face another Corona winter – with renewed restrictions in many areas of life. If so, the resistance of the critics will probably flare up again against everything that they perceive as state encroachment. Many of them are now very well networked and organized – also in associations that like to be sponsored by the tax office as charitable.
This raises difficult questions: How much contradiction does the state have to tolerate? And when can the authorities refuse funding to the critics? The Federal Fiscal Court (BFH) now has these questions in an urgent procedure (Ref. VB 25/21) answered: If an association provides information that contradicts parliaments and governments, it is fundamentally protected. But anyone who wants to create a political mood with barely disguised calls to fight and conspiracy theories is not a non-profit organization.
With the decision, the BFH is once again entering sensitive territory. On the one hand, those who already suspect that the state and the judiciary want to silence criticism of the Corona measures should feel confirmed. Because the loss of the non-profit means significant financial losses for clubs. You then have to pay more taxes and are not allowed to issue donation receipts that donors can claim in their tax return. On the other hand, there is again a dispute about what is still necessary commitment for the funded purpose – and what is politics. At least since the BFH revoked the non-profit status of the globalization-critical organization Attac at the beginning of 2019, a new legal regulation has been demanded time and again – but so far without success.
The case now decided by the BFH is about an association founded last year that aims to “promote the public health system” and “promote the general democratic state system” – two purposes that follow applicable law are non-profit. This is how the association was initially treated by the responsible tax office. A little later, however, the officials found on its website, among other things, a request to the federal and state governments to immediately lift the corona measures – and a reference that if this did not happen, the right of resistance anchored in the Basic Law would apply. In addition, videos were distributed in which a functionary spoke about “other powers” who had planned the pandemic and on which politics was dependent. The tax office thereupon recognized the non-profit status of the association: It does not promote the purposes set out in the statutes, but pursues purely political goals.
The Munich Finance Court saw it that way – and so did the BFH. Because, according to the judges’ assessment, it was not just about “one-off, minor, but ongoing violations”, the association “exceeded the limits of what is inevitably linked to a certain political objective in order to promote public health”. It simply lacks “a connection with the prevention and control of epidemics and diseases”.