Language debate
Government circles: The term “race” remains in the Basic Law
Activists put up a display with the imprint “Basic Law” in front of the Reichstag
© Britta Pedersen / DPA
There have been repeated arguments about the term “race” in the constitution. The traffic light government almost deleted it from the legal text. Now he’s staying.
According to information from coalition circles, the traffic light wants to implement the project that was already discussed in the previous election period Deleting the term “race” from the Basic Law will not be pursued further. The “Rheinische Post” first reported about it on Friday.
Article 3 of the Basic Law currently states: “No one may be disadvantaged or favored because of their gender, their ancestry, their race, their language, their homeland and origin, their faith, their religious or political views. No one may be disadvantaged because of their disability. ” The ban on discrimination arose against the background of National Socialism and was intended to prevent racist discrimination. However, critics complain that the current wording of the constitution also conveys the idea that human races actually exist.
The President of the Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, spoke out last year against deleting the term. This is reminiscent of German history, especially “of the persecution and murder of millions of people, primarily Jews; of the horrors of the Shoah,” he wrote in a guest article for the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. If you delete this memory from the constitution, “at some point we will also delete it from our memory.”
Union welcomes traffic light government’s decision
The Union welcomed the coalition’s decision on Friday. The general counsel of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Ansgar Heveling (CDU), told the “Rheinische Post”: “It’s good that reason prevailed at the traffic lights. Our Basic Law is too bad for compulsive symbolic politics with unforeseeable legal consequences.” According to the newspaper, one of the reasons for abandoning the project is that the legal implementation of the deletion is too complicated.
The Union faction’s legal expert, Günter Krings (CDU), made a similar statement: The attempt to remove the Basic Law from its historical context at this point was “harmful and doomed to failure” from the outset. “The fathers and mothers of the Basic Law deliberately wrote it into the constitutional text in sharp contrast to the criminal and inhumane policies of the Nazis.”