Justice Ministers Conference
Online crime: Bavaria also wants to prosecute abroad
Online criminals who operate from abroad are difficult to prosecute in Germany. photo
© Nicolas Armer/dpa
Federal and state justice ministers will meet in Berlin on Thursday and Friday. The agenda is long. An application comes from southern Germany, the implementation of which could have global consequences.
In view of the growing number of crimes abroad with violations of the law in Germany, Bavaria is demanding more powers for local investigators.
“Criminals have adapted their methods to the digital age. If perpetrators put criminal content online abroad that can also be accessed in Germany, our law enforcement authorities can only prosecute the perpetrators if German criminal law is applicable,” said Bavaria’s Minister of Justice Georg Eisenreich (CSU). the German Press Agency in Munich. Digitization offers great opportunities, but also entails risks.
Eisenreich announced a motion for the Justice Ministers’ Conference on May 25 and 26 in Berlin, which aims to extend the application of German criminal law to offenses committed abroad. “The best crimes are of no use to our investigators if they don’t apply,” he said. The attempts at a solution by the Federal Ministry of Justice have so far only been patchy. Therefore, Bavaria has now made a differentiated proposal.
“Internet as a means of action”
According to statistics from the Federal Criminal Police Office for 2022, property and counterfeiting offenses accounted for 64.6 percent of all crimes involving the internet. The majority of these were fraud offenses (61.4 percent). In 2022, a total of 396,184 crimes involving the internet were registered in Germany.
German criminal law currently applies without restriction only to offenses committed in Germany (Section 3 of the Criminal Code). “In some cases, criminal offenses abroad are not currently recorded with legal certainty by German criminal law. The result: Although the perpetrators – sometimes even deliberately – violate legally protected interests in Germany, they cannot be prosecuted in Germany,” says Eisenreich. This applies not only to offenses of expression and dissemination on the Internet, such as instructions for criminal offences, depictions of violence or insults.
As the statistics show, this is also of practical importance in numerous other cases. These include the misuse of identity papers (§ 281 StGB), for example in the case of fraud via online banking or violations of the Sanctions Enforcement and Foreign Trade Acts by oligarchs based abroad.