GERMANY: Police raid on-line anti-deportation demonstrators
01 August 2001
On 17 October, police officers broke into the offices of Libertad! (a group founded in 1993 in support of political prisoners), and confiscated all of their computers as well as several hard-drives, cd-roms and other documents. The raid followed the online demonstration against the Lufthansa website on June 20 this year, which the German network "no one is illegal" and Libertad! organised, in order to protest against the deportation of refugees with the help of the airline Deutsche Lufthansa AG. In addition, the homes of those responsible for the websites of Libertad! and www.sooderso.de, were searched. Police confiscated six computers and more than one hundred cd-roms. According to the search warrent, issued by the administrative court in Frankfurt, 13,614 people had taken part in the 20 June action. Because Lufthansa claimed it had suffered economic damage by the more than 1.2 million page-hits, the police claimed that the online-action was putting Lufthansa under duress (Noetigung). Additionally, the call for protests by more than 150 participating human rights groups and Refugee Councils was interpreted as encitement to criminal damage, (Anstiftung zu Straftaten).
Around 40,000 rejected asylum seekers are deported from Germany every year. Most of the deportations by air are carried out by commercial airlines for profit. The "deportation business" has increasingly come under attack by campaigners (see Statewatch vol 10 no 3 & 4), in particular after the death of the Sudanese asylum seeker Aamir Ageeb on board a Lufthansa plane in 1999. As a response to the protests, the German pilot association Cockpit has issued a recommendation to their pilots to refuse the deportation of refugees against their will (see Statewatch vol 11 no 1).
Contrary to Lufthansa's promises to end their involvement in forced deportations, reports suggest otherwise, which is why anti-deportation protesters continued their DeportationClass campaign against Lufthansa. "This is an attack on the freedom of demonstrations", said Anne Morell who had officially announced the online demonstration on June 10 to the municipal administration office (Ordnungsamt) in Cologne. "It is a scandal that 13,000 demonstrators are criminalised, whereas enterprises, making profits from deportations, can do their business on the internet", an activist said. Meanwhile, a software-toolkit for online-demonstrations has been put on the web on the homepage of the online-demonstrators. "We hope, that e-protest in the age of e-commerce will rise" said Morell, "and we call on all democrats and those opposed to deportations to protest against this mentality of a police state".
see http://www.deportation-alliance.com/, http://www.noborder.org/ news_ index.php and http://germany.indymedia.org/ for more information.