Georg Eisenreich speaks perhaps the most important sentences of this session at around 9.40 a.m. Earlier on Thursday, Bavaria’s justice minister spoke a little in the state parliament’s interior committee to have May 24 recapitulated. On that day, the police carried out nationwide house searches on members of the “last generation” on behalf of Bavarian authorities. In addition to accounts and documents, the climate activists’ website was confiscated – and provided with a warning about a “criminal organization”. This formulation, Eisenreich now makes it clear, was not correct. The authorities only investigated because of an initial suspicion that “of course” the presumption of innocence applies. And: The criticism was “justified”.
So is that it? The raid with 170 police officers on the “last generation”, which is as present as it is controversial and which is making a name for itself with road blockades, is it a kind of miscarriage of justice? In any case, the investigation is continuing, and the confiscated data is currently being evaluated for indications that could support the initial suspicion of “education” and “support of a criminal organization”. Lawsuits against the searches are still pending. But at least the question marks around are a bit smaller after this Thursday.
So also the question of who is responsible for the said warning. “The last generation constitutes a criminal organization according to Section 129 of the Criminal Code!” read the homepage after the confiscation, with the logos of the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office and the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office. And, “Caution”: Donations to this organization constituted “a punishable support”.
It sounded as if the “last generation” had already been criminally convicted. The public outcry was correspondingly large: Bavaria’s authorities operated prejudice, it was said. Or that the raid was politically motivated, on the instructions of the CSU-led Ministry of Justice. The fact that the misleading reference was soon replaced by a more neutral one didn’t help. “We need clarity as to how this blatant violation of the presumption of innocence could have happened in such a large-scale investigation,” said Green Party leader Katharina Schulze before the committee meeting. People’s trust in the rule of law should not be “gambled away”.
Ministerial interference? “We’re pretty quickly in the area of conspiracy theories”
Eisenreich made it clear on Thursday: Of course, his ministry was informed of the investigation several times, as is usual with important investigations. However, Eisenreich does not want to have interfered in them. “We quickly get into the realm of conspiracy theories,” he says. In the four and a half years of his tenure, he had not issued a single instruction to a public prosecutor’s office – and “if I were to issue one, I would make it public”. Later in front of the press, Eisenreich would only say tight-lipped about his role: “This debate annoys me.”
The Central Office for Combating Extremism and Terrorism (ZET) is said to have been responsible for the misleading warning. She is based at the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office and is leading the investigations into seven people in the “Last Generation” case. But one shouldn’t “hang on politically” by its name, says Eisenreich, and the tasks of the ZET have been “expanded” in recent years. The Ministry was not informed in advance about the confiscation of the website and the wording of the warning. In order to avoid similar mistakes in the future, they want to make a “model letter” available to all public prosecutors.
There are now 13 criminal charges against members of the “Last Generation”.
If one follows Eisenreich’s statements and those of the Interior Secretary Sandro Kirchner (CSU), who was also invited, the investigations were preceded by a lawyer’s complaint. In the meantime, there are even said to be 13 criminal charges against members of the “last generation”. The authorities would have to pursue this, according to the Code of Criminal Procedure. Regarding another allegation that the police stormed the activists’ apartments with drawn guns, Kirchner says: At least that was “not the case” for the searched objects in Bavaria. Also, no one was taken into custody in Bavaria.
The answers are sometimes more, sometimes less, for the committee members. Representatives of government and opposition groups are largely in agreement that the statements are helpful – because they show how complex the facts of the criminal organization are. While CSU man Holger Dremel sees the misleading warning as a “faux pas,” SPD MP Horst Arnold in particular is asking for more information: for example, how the search warrants came about. Were these previously rejected by other judges until one finally signed them? But Eisenreich and Kirchner can give just as little information about this “due to a lack of information” as they can about the membership structure and financial flows of the “last generation”.
And the central question also remains unanswered for the time being: To what extent do climate protectionists fulfill the characteristics of a criminal organization and pose “a significant threat to public safety”. An alleged act of sabotage on the Transalpine oil pipeline could still play an important role – at least according to the investigators’ assessment. In April 2022, two representatives of the “last generation” are said to have tried to disrupt the pipeline that supplies large parts of Bavaria with crude oil. All of this, says Eisenreich, is ultimately not a political question, but a legal question: “Decisions are made by independent judges.”