The German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) now has offensive and other criminally relevant comments, especially from social media users, prosecuted just as consistently as the German Football Association (DFB). DOSB President Thomas Weikert and the First Vice President of the DFB, Ronny Zimmermann, presented their common line on Monday at a press conference with Chief Public Prosecutor Benjamin Krause.
Krause works with more than 20 colleagues at the Central Office for Combating Internet Crime (ZIT) of the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office, which has been working since last year and in view of the flood of hate comments in DFB postings on the occasion of the U-17 European and World Championships as well as the European Championship for U-21 juniors cooperates with the DFB.
Before the Olympic Games in Paris in the summer, the DOSB is standing in front of the German athletes, said Weikert. He recalled the death threats that modern pentathlete Annika Zillekens was exposed to after the 2021 Olympic Games, the “racist component of the insults” against German basketball players after her elimination there and the insults against Vanessa Voigt at the recent Biathlon World Cup.
“No acceptance of mistakes”
On Monday, Zimmermann once again vividly described how the DFB had decided to go on the offensive in view of the flood of insults after two missed penalties in the U-21 national team’s first European Championship game against Israel in Georgia last year. It is a question of decency to protect your own athletes. “We are finding that there is no longer any acceptance of mistakes at all,” he said. “These reactions are profoundly bad. That has to get out of our society.”
Last fall, the association reported hate comments to the ZIT under a picture of its U-17 world champions that was broadcast on the DFB channel. In April, the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office informed the FAZ in response to a request that the Hessian State Criminal Police Office was still trying to determine the identity of the authors of criminally relevant posts in five cases.
The identity of the suspects has been determined in six cases and the cases have been handed over to public prosecutors in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. Weikert, Zimmermann and Krause called on federal politicians to create an exception for insult offenses, similar to the one for politicians.
No consistent line
In your opinion, the requirement to file a criminal complaint should be eliminated in cases in which athletes compete in competitions for the Federal Republic. This would eliminate an obstacle for prosecutors; According to information from the FAZ, Hesse wants to bring up the topic of exceptional circumstances for athletes at the Justice Ministers’ Conference in Hanover at the beginning of June.
According to the current law, the athletes remain “their own masters” when it comes to the issue of criminal charges for insults, said Zimmermann. They must expect that they will be called as witnesses in the district courts, which from the officials’ point of view is a not insignificant factor when weighing up whether criminal charges should be filed in the event of insults.
There is no uniform line even before the upcoming European Football Championship, although the DFB recently supported a senior national player for the first time when he reported statements by journalist Julian Reichelt about Antonio Rüdiger and his posting to ZIT at the beginning of the fasting month of Ramadan. This passed the report on to the Berlin public prosecutor’s office, where Rüdiger filed a criminal complaint.
With regard to the team for the Olympic Games, Weikert said that the DOSB would point out the issue in joint calls and discuss concerns. He assumes that there will be more cases of so-called “hate speech” during the games. Krause reported from the investigator’s practice that the ZIT, which has been dealing specifically with “hate speech” on the Internet since 2019, has “conducted around 6,000 proceedings”.
In proceedings that were completed in Hesse, there were “noticeable reactions” in around a quarter of the cases: fines, fines or prison sentences. The law must be enforced, including on the Internet, said Krause, in order to counteract the brutalization of social interactions: “What consequences would it have if these comments, including calls for murder, were to remain? We would think that’s normal.”