Germany

Custody

Remand must be ordered by a judge. Usually, a suspect cannot be detained for more than six months without a conviction.

The death penalty is abolished. A court may order that a person be detained indefinitely even after the sentence is completed, if the person is convicted of particularly serious crimes and is judged, after expert testimony, to be a danger to the public (Sicherungsverwahrung).

The German citizen Khalid El-Masri was abducted by the CIA in 2005 and interred without trial for months, although innocent. German intelligence was informed early about this, but undertook nothing, which was subject to an intense political debate.

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of speech is guaranteed by the constitution. However, Volksverhetzung(incitement of the people) is a crime, defined as spreading hate against or insult against a part of the population. In 1994, a paragraph explicitly forbidding denial of Nazi crimes was added. These practices were criticized by a United States Department of State report.

Freedom of Assembly

Open-air public rallies require (generally) prior announcement to the local authorities, but no permits. Local authorities can prohibit rallies only on grounds of public safety concerns or involvement of outlawed organizations.

Freedom of Press

Freedom of press is generally very established in Germany; the 2009 Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders rates Germany at place 18 of 175 countries.

The most notable incident involving free press restrictions was the Spiegel scandal of 1962, when the Minister of Defense Franz Josef Strauß ordered the unlawful arrest of several journalists after an article accusing him of bribery. The scandal led to the dismissal of Strauß from office and severely damaged the reputation of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

In 2005, minister of the interior Otto Schily authorized a raid of offices of the periodical Cicero, which was criticized as an attack on press freedom by part of the German press. The raid was based on a substantiated suspicion of leaking of state secrets. However, on February 27, 2007, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that suspicion that a journalist is aiding the betrayal of state secrets is not sufficient to warrant a search, and thus the raid was illegal. The finding has been widely regarded as a strengthening of press freedom.

A scandal regarding spying on journalists by the secret service Bundesnachrichtendienst, starting in May 2006, has not been cleared up yet.

Minority and foreign parents discrimination

Ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the political process and in public life, especially the civil service. German Jugendamt tend to discriminate against foreign parents.

Human trafficking

There has been a growing awareness of human trafficking as a human rights issue in Europe. The end of communism and collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has contributed to an increase in human trafficking, with the majority of victims being women forced into prostitution. Germany is a transit and destination country for persons, primarily women, trafficked mainly from Central and Eastern Europe and from Africa for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Russia alone accounted for one-quarter of the 1,235 identified victims reported in 2003, the latest year for which statistics are available. For the first time, Germany's statistics included German nationals who numbered 127.

Police brutality

A man, A.Ö., died in a hospital on 5 March 2009 after falling into a coma while in police custody in Hagen on 17 February where he had been bound face-down. The Office of the Public Prosecutor terminated its investigations and found that the force used by the police was proportionate, despite the fact that since 2000, police officers have been trained not to restrain a person face-down because of the danger of asphyxia.

In December 2008, the regional court of Dessau acquitted two police officers of killing Oury Jalloh as a result of negligence. Oury Jalloh had died 2005 when a fire broke out in his cell, where he was restrained to the bed. In its oral reasons for the judgment, the court stated lack of evidence as the reason for the acquittal, and strongly criticized the testimonies of most of the police officers who were witnesses in the court case. On 13 December 2012, the regional court of Magdeburg overruled the earlier acquittal, and ruled for negligent homicide. An earlier accusation of bodily harm with fatal consequences was dropped by the public prosecution for lack of evidence. The accused officer was condemned to a fine of 10,800 Euro by the court, in excess of the 6,300 Euro plead for by prosecution.

Refugees

Amnesty International and other organizations reported several incidents of mistreatment of refugees. Also, the practice of deporting asylum seekers to countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Kosovo, where their safety is unclear, is widely criticized.

Torture

There are no reports on systematic use of torture in Germany. However, there were some related incidents.

In 2002, Frankfurt's police vice president Wolfgang Daschner ordered a subordinate officer to threaten the suspect of a kidnapping to use force in order to get information on the whereabouts of the abductee (the abductee was killed shortly after the kidnapping, but the suspect told the police that the child was still alive, and Daschner decided to break the law to save the child's life. Daschner himself wrote down an official note of his actions). This triggered an emotional debate over the legality of such measures. Daschner was convicted to the lowest possible penalty of a fine. Daschner and the subordinate officer remained in duty.

In a trial against terror suspect Mounir El Motassadeq, a court used evidence provided by US authorities, despite widespread evidence of torture in US detainment camps. The conviction was rejected in appeal due to lack of evidence. In January 2007 he was condemned for 15 years in detention.

Surveillance

Several parties, such as the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and the communist platform of the Left Party, are under surveillance from the Verfassungsschutz("Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution"). The use of police informers has sometimes been criticized as excessive[. A motion to label the NPD as an illegal organization was abandoned, because it became apparent that many actions of the NPD were actually controlled by the Verfassungsschutz. In addition to parties, the German Government placed the Church of Scientology and its members in Germany under surveillance by the Verfassungsschutz since 1997 for the alleged goal of abolishing the order based on the German Grundgesetz.