Right to a pleasant shopping experience trumps right to demonstrate

The Paul­skirche in Frank­furt stands in the shadow of the bank­ing district

The Blockupy Alli­ance have indic­ated their inten­tion to appeal the decision of the Frank­furt Admin­is­trat­ive Court yes­ter­day in which but for two excep­tions the total ban on protest declared by the Frank­furt author­it­ies for 16 – 19 May was upheld.

“If you read the court’s decisions, you will notice that the court only relies on the asser­tions and danger fore­casts of the city and the police. The sig­ni­fic­ance of the fun­da­mental right to free assembly is not val­ued – in con­trast to the fun­da­mental rights of the free­dom of pro­fes­sion and prop­erty”, says Mar­tin Behrs­ing from Blockupy.

Frankfurt’s well-​known news­pa­per the Frank­furter Rundschau even went so far as to express dis­be­lief that the right to a pleas­ant shop­ping exper­i­ence and a quiet cof­fee were being used as the basis to over­turn the Ger­man Con­sti­tu­tion. It should not be sur­prised, how­ever. The Frank­furt author­it­ies’ belief that con­sumer­ism is a right, and that “viol­ence” cov­ers any attempt to restrict the flow of cap­ital, is part of a global trend in which cap­ital as such is being gran­ted rights analag­ous to those fought for by humans.

Read­ers of this blog will be aware of Ferrando’s dis­cus­sion of the Abaclat Leg­acy, in which an arbit­ral tribunal held that the rights of bond investors were to be treated as per­emp­tory norms of inter­na­tional law. Secur­it­ies agree­ments are them­selves just one example of how the legal struc­tures and cus­toms of finance-​friendly jur­is­dic­tions are raised to a lex mer­cat­oria before insinu­at­ing them­selves across jur­is­dic­tions in every part of th globe. Like­wise, the EU has its own concept of free move­ment of cap­ital – lit­er­ally a right of refuge from social demands such as demo­crat­ic­ally determ­ined tax­a­tion regimes. Indeed, the most egre­gious example of this trend has been the recog­ni­tion of capital’s right to self-​determination, that is, the right to install its own tech­no­cratic gov­ern­ments in Greece and Italy when humans made “inap­pro­pri­ate” choices. Nat­ur­ally this move­ment must be seen in the long arc of mater­ial his­tory – not least tak­ing into account the eternal per­son­al­ity cap­ital may obtain qua cor­por­a­tion, and thereby allow­ing it to type into prop­erly per­sonal rights such as the right to prop­erty – but recent lurches towards a fuller mode of dir­ectly author­it­arian cap­it­al­ism have required greater audacity.

Against this back­ground “…the court has stopped the attempt to pre­vent any kind of demo­cratic protest in Frank­furt and to revoke the fun­da­mental right to free assembly”, Roland Suess from Blockupy said. “How­ever, we not only want to protest at the demon­stra­tion on Sat­urday, we want to present our cri­tique of the policies of impov­er­ish­ment across Europe to the pub­lic where it is vis­ible, with diverse actions and a fant­astic pro­gramme.” The ban affects numer­ous ral­lies, gath­er­ings, assem­blies, and pick­ets with an extens­ive artistic and polit­ical pro­gramme that includes more than 70 panel dis­cus­sions, work­shops, read­ings, exhib­i­tions and con­certs – for instance with the Ger­man singer-​songwriter Kon­stantin Wecker.

The court also con­firmed the evic­tion of the Occupy camp decreed by the city for the dur­a­tion of the action days. The Blockupy alli­ance again calls on all people from Frank­furt to join the camp on Tues­day even­ing and to sup­port the pass­ive res­ist­ance of the Occupy act­iv­ists against a pos­sible evic­tion by the police. Chris­toph Kleine from Blockupy says: “And we call on all par­ti­cipants of the protest to join the rally of the Com­mit­tee for Fun­da­mental Rights and Demo­cracy on Thursday at 12pm at Paulsplatz for the fun­da­mental right to free­dom of assembly.” Paulsplatz is the tra­di­tional site of protest in Frank­furt am Main because it con­nects the town hall on the Roe­mer­berg to the Paul­skirche. It is this church which is per­haps one of the most sig­ni­fic­ant sites in Ger­man demo­cratic his­tory for it was here that the first pub­licly freely elec­ted assembly sat dur­ing the days of the 1848 revolu­tions. It was thus here that the newly con­sti­tuted Fed­eral Repub­lic returned in 1949 to loc­ate for itself a sym­bol of demo­cracy and con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity in Ger­many after the dark years of author­it­ari­an­ism. The choice of Paulsplatz as a site of protest against pre-​emptory bans on protest as such is as apt as it is shock­ingly necessary.

This morn­ing (15 May) the next instance court, based in Kas­sel in north­ern Hesse, acknow­ledged that it had received an applic­a­tion for appeal from at least one affected party: Die Linke in Frank­furt. In the mean­time the police have closed off much of the open spaces in and around the bank­ing dis­trict centred on Willy-​Brandt Platz and have formed a ring around the Occupy camp there. The Occupy move­ment, who had said they were will­ing to nego­ti­ate with the author­it­ies for a tem­por­ary sus­pen­sion of their protest, have now stated that in the face of author­it­arian and uncon­sti­tu­tional meas­ures by the Frank­furt gov­ernors, they will pass­ively res­ist all attempts to move them.

UPDATE 17:10 CET: The head of Hesse’s police union has mean­while indir­ectly cri­ti­cised the Frank­furt author­it­ies’ hand­ling of the Blockupy court cases. Heini Schmitt, based in Darm­stadt, said that “we would have very much wel­comed it if the Admin­is­trat­ive Court had allowed a total ban to remain in place”. The sub­text of this being that the gen­er­al­ity of the restric­tion of the right to demon­strate, which the Frank­furt court has done its best to main­tain while allow­ing cer­tain spe­cial excep­tions, has now led to a scen­ario in which the polcie forces must deal with a patch­work of dif­fer­ent rules and per­mis­sions being in place across Frank­furt. Schmitt implied that this makes poli­cing far more com­plic­ated and claims for con­sti­tu­tional wrong­do­ing far more likely, than if the total ban had remained in place.

As if to emphas­ise the com­plex­ity of the oper­a­tion, the police are mak­ing clear that there will be 5,000 officers in place in Frank­furt, poli­cing up to 40,000 demon­strat­ors from across Europe, of whom they claim up to 2,000 are “ready for viol­ence”. It is unclear whether they count such bloodthirsty mil­it­ants as the Mar­burg Human­ist Soci­ety or the Young Greens Frank­furt Branch among that lat­ter number.

Tags: Blockupy

This entry was posted on 15 May 2012 at 10:33 am and is filed under Series: Frankfurt Blockupy May 16–19 2012, Slideshow. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.