The “Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland e.V.” (ISD e.V.) and others oppose official racism.

*Racial profiling allows police to stop people based solely on appearance, such as skin color, and to search and detain them if necessary.

Since November 20, it is possible for four weeks to sign our petition against the discriminatory treatment by the Federal Police. If we reach the limit of 50,000 signatures, we can present our request to the Bundestag in person.

*Please support our initiative for the equality of all people in Germany!*
*Here it goes to the petition at Bundestag.de:*
*https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/petitionen/_2012/_11/_07/Petition_37656.nc.html*

Wording of the petition:

*We, the petitioners, call upon the German Bundestag and the Federal Government to introduce and implement the following measures to end discrimination through “Racial/Ethnic Profiling”. “Racial/ethnic profiling” describes the discriminatory use of attributions (such as ethnicity, phenotypic characteristics**, national origin, or religion) as the basis for identity checks and searches without specific circumstantial evidence by federal police.*

Specifically, we demand:

* To abolish the federal regulations that allow so-called suspicionless identity checks by the police. During these checks, people are selected on the basis of a purely subjective assessment by the officials according to external criteria, without any verifiable reasons having to be given. These controls therefore inevitably promote unequal treatment based on racial/ethnic profiling.

* To include acts of discrimination emanating from state actors – which includes “racial/ethnic profiling” by the police – in Section 2 of the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG).

* Enable police agencies to perform their sovereign duties without racial/ethnic profiling through anti-racism training and a revision of operational strategy. Both police training and the continuing education of police officers must respond appropriately to this challenge.

* Create reporting structures that allow for the complete recording of misconduct by police officers. These incidents must be analyzed and dealt with by an independent and competent review body. Nationwide statistics are to be kept on this.

Justification

Officially, “Racial/Ethnic” does not exist in the Federal Republic of Germany. In a small question to the German government on the subject from 2011 (printed matter 17/6778), the German government’s answer was:
/”A different treatment of persons depending on race, origin or religion is not included in the Federal Police Act as well as in the other regulations and decrees applicable to the Federal Police, if only because such methods are incompatible with the understanding of police work in a democratic constitutional state.”/.
However, this view may be based solely on theoretical considerations of the application of police law. The reality of police work is obviously misunderstood. The practice of “racial/ethnic profiling” is inherent in the suspicionless control of persons or dragnet searches.

The aim here is to keep a lookout for suspiciously “foreign” looking people, in particular to prevent unauthorized entry. The fact that discrimination on the basis of racial, ethnic and religious characteristics regularly occurs is also shown by numerous reports from those affected.
Black people in Germany and People of Color (PoC is the self-chosen designation of people who have experienced racism) are repeatedly the target of “racial/ethnic profiling” by police on trains, at train stations and airports, and in other public places. They are publicly branded as suspects by this police control practice and it is visibly questioned for the whole environment that they are staying in Germany legally. In December 2010, for example, a black German on the route Koblenz – Frankfurt/M. was asked for identification by the federal police as part of a suspicionless identity check. He has been the target of such checks himself on several occasions. In addition, he had repeatedly witnessed how blacks or people of color were checked for no reason, while other passengers did not have to show identification. Therefore, he refused to show his papers and was subsequently searched and taken away. After the police officers openly admitted that he was controlled because of his skin color, he sued against this action. While the Koblenz Administrative Court had no problem with this police practice and his complaint was dismissed there, the Rhineland-Palatinate Higher Administrative Court found beyond doubt that this measure must be classified as illegal. The federal police had to acknowledge this and apologize to the student. The chairman of the German Police Union, Rainer Wendt, has pointed out in a statement that these racist measures are in line with common police practice.
The Initiative Black People in Germany (ISD), the Office for the Implementation of Equal Treatment e.V. (BUG), as well as a large number of affected people’s associations, organizations in equality work and individuals are dismayed by this police practice. Racist attitudes in the population are reinforced by these police checks. Here, a contradiction with the principle of equal treatment as laid down in Article 3 of the Basic Law seems obvious. The unclear legal situation in the Federal Police Act urgently requires clarification. This is all the more true since international and European bodies such as the UN Human Rights Committee and the European Fundamental Rights Agency have already stated that checks on persons and identification based solely or essentially on criteria such as a person’s “ethnic” ascription or “skin color” violate the prohibition of racial discrimination. In 2001, the German government signed the final declaration of the 3rd UN World Conference against Racism in Durban, in which the signatory states agreed/ “…to design, implement and enforce effective measures to eliminate the phenomenon popularly known as ‘racial profiling’ and comprising the practice of police and other law enforcement officers relying, to any degree, on race, color, descent or national or ethnic origin as the basis for subjecting persons to investigatory activities or for determining whether an individual is engaged in criminal activity”/.

Similarly, Article 6 of the Schengen Borders Code clarifies with regard to border controls for EU Member States that they must respect human rights obligations when carrying them out. Racial discrimination is thus explicitly prohibited.