As of: March 28, 2024, 5:27 p.m
By: Kilian Beck
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The Potsdam public prosecutor sees no evidence of illegal sound recordings by Correctiv. Another participant in the secret meeting fails in court in Hamburg.
Potsdam - The Potsdam public prosecutor's office will not investigate employees of the investigative portal Correctiv and other people accused in connection with reporting on a meeting of radical right-wingers. The public prosecutor's office announced on Thursday (March 28) that there was no initial suspicion of prosecutable crimes. Criminal complaints were filed
against
Correctiv
and its employees for, among other things, violations of the confidentiality of the word, the most personal sphere of life and personal rights through image recordings.
View of the guest house at Lehnitzsee in the Neu Fahrland district of Potsdam. © Jens Kalaene/dpa
Potsdam public prosecutor sees no evidence of AfD allegations against Correctiv
The magazine reported on a secret meeting in a Potsdam villa on January 10, 2024 under the title “Secret plan against Germany”. AfD member of the Bundestag Gerrit Huy placed one of the advertisements because of the images and possible audio recordings. Huy told the
German Press Agency (dpa)
at the time that she wanted to gain access to any audio and video recordings in order to sue for their release in the event of a positive outcome and, in particular, to subsequently make audio recordings public
.
The Potsdam public prosecutor's office has now stated that there is no evidence that unauthorized audio recordings of the meeting were made. “If it was possible to infer from individual press reports that audio recordings could have been made secretly, this was not confirmed after examination.” The image recordings also did not violate the boundaries of the “highly personal sphere of life,” explained a spokesman for the authority. No images were found that were created in protected rooms in the sense of a “last personal retreat area”.
Publication permitted: Pictures from the Potsdam secret meeting are “contemporary history”
According to the public prosecutor's office, the distribution of these images also falls under the concept of contemporary history and is therefore permissible. Correctiv published, among other things, photos taken from the outside of the meeting in a hotel as well as images that, according to Correctiv, were filmed inside with a smartwatch. Audio recordings of the meeting are not known.
In addition to the former head of the Identitarian Movement in Austria, Martin Sellner, AfD politicians as well as individual members of the CDU and the very conservative “Values Union” took part in the meeting of radical right-wingers on November 25th in Potsdam. Sellner spoke at the meeting in Potsdam about “remigration” – when right-wing extremists use this term, they usually mean that large numbers of people of foreign origin should leave the country, even under duress. This core content of the publication was never legally challenged. After the publication of the research, Gerrit Huy confirmed that the AfD was committed to the “remigration” of foreigners who were required to leave the country. She did not reject Sellner's demand to encourage “non-assimilated citizens” to leave the country.
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Appeal from participants in the secret meeting fails at the Hamburg Higher Regional Court
So far, Correctiv only had to adapt one passage. The portal should no longer suggest that the constitutional lawyer Ulrich Vosgerau suggested at the meeting that mass objections to election results could be organized using a “model letter”. The Hamburg Regional Court ruled in February that Vosgerau had stated that he did not support this “mass” approach. The lawyer attacked two more passages of the text and lost in court. The Hamburg Higher Regional Court confirmed the judgment on Wednesday (March 27). In an interview with the trade union magazine
Journalistin
, the editor-in-chief of Correctiv identified
a “trend of using court proceedings as a PR tool to sow doubt in the public, regardless of the outcome of the proceedings”.
(kb/dpa)