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Germany: Court might decriminalise PKK

01 August 2004

On 19 August, the German Federal High Court (Bundesgerichtshof) indicated during an appeal, that the "democratisation" process started by the PKK might lead to it being taken off of the German list of "criminal organisations". The PKK was banned in Germany in 1993. After the arrest of Abdullah Öcalan in January 2000, it announced an end to the armed struggle. The organisation had already been downgraded from "terrorist" to "criminal" by the federal prosecutor's office in 1998. Last year, the PKK renamed itself the People's Congress of Kurdistan (Kongra-Gel). The appeal was initiated by two PKK leaders who had received prison sentences from the higher regional court of Lower Saxony on grounds of membership of a criminal organisation. The presiding judge Walter Winkler argued that since it had renounced violence, the PKK had not committed any "deliberate and overt" (demonstrative) criminal acts such as the occupation of embassies and consulates. The prosecution representative Wolfgang Kalf countered this by stating that the PKK was still a Marxist-Leninist organisation with an authoritarian leadership that had remained open to the use of violence if political circumstances changed. A final decision by the court on the appeal is expected. Südeutsche Zeitung 20.8.04