Improvements in disaster and civil protection and the fight against hate and hate speech on the Internet: these are two main topics of the three-day spring meeting, for which the interior ministers of the 16 federal states met in Würzburg on Wednesday afternoon. Joachim Herrmann (CSU), the head of the Bavarian department, welcomed his colleagues and Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) to the Congress Center CCW.
Security is a top priority at the Conference of Interior Ministers (IMK) in Würzburg. A strong police presence is noticeable in the city center, especially since protests were announced in advance. On Wednesday evening, around 200 left-wing activists demonstrated against the IMK under the motto “No power to the security authorities”. This Thursday, refugee aid organizations from all over Bavaria want to protest in Würzburg against what they believe to be a restrictive asylum policy.
Migration policy was also a topic of the first round of talks between ministers on Wednesday, to which Georg Bätzing, Chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, was invited. The bishop thanked politicians for how quickly and unbureaucratically they organized the reception of refugees from Ukraine, Herrmann said in the evening. On the subject of sexual abuse, he once again made it clear that employees of church institutions are obliged to report any suspected case to the state authorities, said the minister.
Herrmann pleads for real name duty
One focus of the three-day meeting is the fight against hate speech on social media. The conference will discuss “how criminals can be better identified online,” said Joachim Herrmann. The Bavarian Minister of the Interior advocates that people who register in a social network must provide real names and truthful data.
At the same time, the providers should be obliged to check the identity information and hand it over to the police in the event of investigations. In order to discuss the practical implementation and also legal problems of a legal regulation, Herrmann wants the IMK to set up a federal-state working group together with the conference of justice ministers.
Meanwhile, the FDP is fighting against extended rights for investigators in criminal offenses in the digital space. “Criminal prosecution online does not lack powers, but rather the consistent enforcement of existing laws,” said interior expert Konstantin Kuhle, referring to the research of “ZDF Magazin Royale” in an interview with the German press agency.
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Böhmermann research topic in Würzburg
Last summer, the editors of the magazine by satirist Jan Böhmermann reported seven obviously criminally relevant hate messages to police stations in all 16 federal states and now described the mostly sluggish course of the investigation in the program. Death threats were displayed, as were anti-Semitic content and anti-constitutional, right-wing extremist symbols.
FDP politician Kuhle calls on the federal states to better coordinate their approach to online crimes: “Internal security must not suffer from federalism.” He assumes that the Böhmermann research is also a topic at the conference of interior ministers, said Herrmann’s spokesman Oliver Platzer when asked.
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