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Bavaria's Justice Minister Georg Eisenreich
Photo: Stefan Puchner / dpa
Citizens should have more opportunities to get help if they have hatred on the Internet.
The chairman of the conference of justice ministers, Georg Eisenreich (CSU), calls for a counseling center to help victims of online hate.
Citizens should "not only be able to file a complaint online," said the Bavarian Minister of Justice on the radio station "Bayern 2".
They should "also have a place where they can get advice."
Hamburg's Justice Senator Anna Gallina (Greens) had previously called for a nationwide online portal to report hate comments.
An application for this is up for debate at the conference of justice ministers in Schwangau.
“The question is whether there should be a nationwide portal for this, or whether the states or state associations do it,” said Eisenreich.
He thinks a counseling center makes sense, because many unfriendly comments on the Internet "do not always cross the line of criminal liability."
Without advice, the public prosecutor's office would be "flooded with reports."
The victims of hate posts often need advice on how to react in such situations.
The background to the initiative is a report by TV satirist Jan Böhmermann on hate crime on the Internet.
Böhmermann's editors wanted to know how police departments in the federal states react to reports of hate on the Internet.
Last summer, she reported seven obviously criminally relevant hate messages to police departments in all 16 federal states and later described the mostly sluggish course of the investigation.
Death threats were displayed, as were anti-Semitic content and anti-constitutional, right-wing extremist symbols.
The fact that some inquiries were sent had consequences for officials in some cases.
Most recently, the investigations were resumed in six out of seven cases by the public prosecutor's office in Stendal (Saxony-Anhalt).
The reason for the resumption was the reporting and the corresponding demand from the press, said a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office.
However, it remains to be seen whether the criminal offenses will actually be clarified or whether there will be sufficient suspicion.
The seven cases in question were dropped in March, the spokesman said.
The main reason for this is the lack of traceability.
Hate postings are often published online using anonymous connection data.
At the time, the responsible public prosecutor did not see any other promising approaches.
It has now been evaluated that the investigations in this case could have gone better.
mfh/dpa
