Climate activist legally convicted for property damage to central building
2022-11-29 Lüneburg/Celle. In the summer of 2021, climate activist Henning Jeschke smeared large areas of wall paint on the facade of Leuphana's central building to draw attention to climate change and call for immediate action. The action caused property damage amounting to well over €10,000. The District Court of Lüneburg had therefore found the defendant guilty of damage to property in two cases and reserved a total fine of 100 daily rates - i.e. more than three months' net income. The defendant appealed against this verdict.
The 2nd Criminal Senate of the Celle Higher Regional Court confirmed the conviction - as only now announced by the court - in a decision dated July 29, 2022 (Case No. 2 Ss 91/22). According to the court, the damage to property was not justified on the basis of a state of emergency pursuant to Section 34 of the German Criminal Code (StGB). It was a symbolic act that had no direct influence on climate change. Furthermore, it was not evident that the danger of climate change could not be averted in any other way than by committing criminal acts.
The damage to the university building - the court continued - is also not justified by "civil disobedience". No one is entitled to interfere with the rights of others in order to attract the attention of the public and to assert one's own views. Those who wish to influence the political opinion-forming process can do so by exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of speech and assembly, their right to petition and their right to form political parties, but not by committing criminal acts. If the legal system were to accept a justification based solely on the actor's conviction of the superiority of his own view, this would amount to a fundamental legalization of criminal acts to achieve political goals.
The Senate's decision is final. The decision will soon be available in anonymized form in the Lower Saxony Case Law Database (http://www.rechtsprechung.niedersachsen.juris.de/jportal/portal/page/bsndprod.psml)