Two female students convicted of "containerizing" food have filed suit with the Federal Constitutional Court. They were caught in June 2018 in the Bavarian town of Olching with fruit and vegetables from the dumpster of a supermarket.
The district court Fürstenfeldbruck interpreted this as a theft and condemned the women to help each eight hours at the local blackboard. They also received a fine of 225 euros on probation. This judgment was confirmed by the Bavarian Supreme Court in early October.
"We continue to see the absurdity in the fact that it is the stolen goods for the supermarket to worthless, to be disposed of garbage," write the students, who call themselves publicly only Franzi and Caro, in their blog.
With their constitutional complaint, they want to make more people aware of the problem of food waste. "As long as there are no clear laws, we must try to interpret the law," said Franz's defender Max Malkus.
According to calculations by the University of Stuttgart, nearly 13 million tons of food end up in Germany every year. The environmental organization WWF even estimates more than 18 million tons. An advance by Hamburg's Senator for Justice Till Steffen (Greens) to legalize the "containers" failed in June at the Justice Ministers Conference in Lübeck at the resistance of the CDU countries.
"We do not want people to go into such an inhumane and hygienically problematic situation," Saxony's Minister of Justice Sebastian Gemkow said as a spokesman for the CDU-led countries in June. It's also about liability issues.
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The students from Bavaria had also started a petition to oblige supermarkets like France to distribute edible food, for example to social institutions. Meanwhile, around 150,000 people have signed.
Franzi and Caro get support from the Society for Freedom Rights (GFF), which has set itself the goal to sue for fundamental and human rights in court. For the non-governmental organization, the procedure is of fundamental importance.
"It's about the question of where the constitutional limit of criminal law," says GFF lawyer Sarah Lincoln. Karlsruhe has repeatedly made it clear that criminal law can only be the last resort. According to these decisions, it should be confined to behavior that is "particularly harmful to the social exclusion and unbearable for the orderly coexistence".
"Criminal law is used here to protect something that no one cares about anymore," says Lincoln. "Especially socially harmful is the disposal of food, not the recovery." Defender Malkus also finds: "In fact, we criminalize those who do something for climate protection on a small scale, without anybody being harmed."
