After one campaign Against him, a member of the Bremen State Court resigned from his honorary position on Tuesday. Bremen lawyer Anatol Anuschewski wrote in a letter to the President of the State Court of Justice and the President of the Bremen Citizenship in a letter obtained by taz that he did not want to use his energy to defend his place at the State Constitutional Court.
In his area of expertise, migration law, there are more important disputes to be had, writes Anuschewski. In addition, he is only a deputy. It is not foreseeable that he will “even be in a position to become an active member of the State Court” during the current term of office.
In the letter he makes serious accusations against those who have accused him since the publication of one Spiegel-Articles had suggested his resignation almost a week ago, including members of all factions of Bremen’s citizenship, including the Left, at whose suggestion he was elected to the body by parliament for the first time in 2019.
“The reputation of the State Court was damaged in just 24 hours by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, tendentious reporting and the behavior of political decision-makers,” criticizes Anuschewski.
Just doing his job
What had happened? As the taz reported on Friday, journalists and politicians had accused Anatol Anuschewski of practicing his profession in compliance with the law, which includes legal independence and client confidentiality.
What sounds like a given was true for two journalists Mirrors pissed off. They had visited the lawyer in his office on Thursday, as they wrote in an article published online the same day. They wanted to “confront him with an action that did not fit his role as the state’s top constitutional watchdog,” the article says.
However, four paragraphs later they write that they have not found out whether their incompatibility hypothesis is correct. They wanted to know what exactly Anatol Anushewski had done on the “evening of January 6th”. According to her assumption, he accompanied three people that evening, who exposed an undercover agent from the Bremen Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
According to her account, he and other members of the interventionist left had confessed to them and other left-wing groups Spying for money for more than eight years and also having unlawful sexual and friendly relationships.
This is what it says on the website of the Interventionist Left. The group is described as “violence-oriented” in the Bremen Office for the Protection of the Constitution from 2024. Evidence for this is missing. The informer who was infiltrated apparently couldn’t confirm his suspicions either.
Anuschewski is not the only one who suspects that she was put on the trail by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution itself, as a retaliation for the unmasking.
The two of them SpiegelIt was enough for journalists to mention the name of the group, which also operates nationwide, to believe they were on the trail of a major scandal. Anuschewski is not the only one who suspects that she was put on the trail by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution itself, as a retaliation for the unmasking.
Now the journalists only had to prove that Anuschewski was actually present when the undercover agent was exposed and, secondly, not as a lawyer, but as a private person. A tricky task that they had to fail at.
“What was your role in confronting the informant?” they wanted to know from him. And heard the same thing that everyone hears, asking lawyers to provide information about client relationships without the consent of their clients and thus making themselves liable to prosecution: nothing.
That the Bremen media and members of the legislative and executive branches agree with the reading of the Mirrors Colleagues of the Bremen lawyer criticize the fact that they joined in and thereby undermined a rule of law principle.
“If the mere exercise of legal activity is to be used as a reason for resignation,” this represents “inadmissible political influence on the independent judiciary” and must be avoided, according to an open letter signed by 55 lawyers to the parliamentary groups and the Senate. The Republican Lawyers’ Association and the Association of Democratic Lawyers expressed similar views.
CDU calls for left-wing senators to resign
The Bremen Lawyers’ Association reminds us that “participation in difficult and conflict-prone conversation situations is at the core of the constitutionally protected legal activity”, for example in family law disputes. That the Spiegel This is scandalous, is “suitable to question the freedom of legal practice” and is therefore a “foundation of the rule of law”.
The Bremen Unemployed Association also published on Tuesday a solidarity call online for the interventionist left.
The CDU parliamentary group again announced motions of no confidence against the two government members from the Left, Kristina Vogt and Claudia Bernhard. The FDP wants to support these applications. However, they could only be voted out in the unlikely event that the SPD and the Greens want to collapse the coalition and also vote for the proposals. The CDU justifies this, among other things, by the fact that the Left had proposed Anatol Anuschewski for the State Court.