Shortly before the vote on cannabis legalization, there is continued criticism of the project. Both the Association of German Criminal Officers and the German Association of Judges spoke out against the law in its current form.
Shortly before the vote in the Bundestag on the controversial partial legalization of cannabis in Germany, the German Association of Judges warned of a massive overload of the judiciary due to the amnesty regulation provided for in the new law.
“The judiciary nationwide is expecting more than 100,000 files that will have to be checked again in the event of the planned retroactive remission of sentences for cannabis offenses,” said the Federal Managing Director of the Association of Judges, Sven Rebehn, to the editorial network Germany.
There are more than 10,000 cases at the Cologne District Court alone. “The five judges responsible there assume an average processing time of at least one hour per case, so that with 2,000 cases per capita and 40 hours per week, the review would mathematically take 50 weeks or a year,” said Rebehn.
Bundestag resolution scheduled for Friday
This Friday, the Bundestag is expected to decide on the controlled release with numerous rules. Ownership and personal cultivation of certain quantities should therefore be permitted for adults from April 1st. After the law comes into force, there will also be an amnesty for convictions for cases that will be permitted in the future.
For the public prosecutor’s offices, the Cannabis Act specifically means “that they have to manually evaluate all criminal files related to the Narcotics Act again to see whether the facts in question would be unpunished under the new legal situation,” said Rebehn.
Association of Germans Detective calls for a stop to the law
The Association of German Criminal Police Officers (BDK) has also called for a stop to the traffic light plans for the partial legalization of cannabis. “This law must be stopped,” said BDK chairman Dirk Peglow to the newspapers of the Funke media group. The law is “a regulatory monster that will be difficult to implement in practice and will not achieve the goals it is intended to achieve.”
The plans will “in principle legalize” small-scale trading, said Peglow. Dealers can carry up to 25 grams and it is not possible for the police to “distinguish between legally grown cannabis and illegal cannabis.” The black market is not curbed, but rather promoted.
Union calls on traffic light MPs to reject the cannabis law
Meanwhile, the Union called on MPs from the traffic light parties to vote against the government’s draft law in the Bundestag. “I appeal to my colleagues at the traffic light: vote against this law on Friday. Stop this irresponsible project,” said the health policy spokesman for the Union parliamentary group, Tino Sorge (CDU), to the “Rheinische Post”.
Sorge acknowledged that the current situation is problematic. But a “completely unsuitable and highly dangerous law” cannot be the answer. However, the Union is ready “for a new attempt”.
The project is also not without controversy within the coalition: there is resistance to the law in parts of the SPD parliamentary group. Some Social Democratic parliamentarians have already declared that they will vote against it.