A woman in Germany has been found guilty of a hate crime and sent to jail for calling a man who was given a suspended sentence for his part in the brutal and prolonged gang-rape of a 15 year-old a “rapist pig”, reports Freddie Attenborough for The Critic.
Maja R, a 20 year-old from Hamburg, sent the direct message to one of the perpetrators who attacked the teenage girl in a local park in 2020, after his name and number were leaked on Snapchat.
“Aren’t you ashamed when you look in the mirror?”, she asked, before calling him a “disgraceful rapist pig” and a “disgusting freak”. Maja R went on to suggest that he “couldn’t go anywhere without getting kicked in the face”, but then quickly added: “[L]et’s hope you are just locked away.”
The male was one of nine young adults convicted of luring the 15 year-old to a secluded area of Hamburg Stadtpark as she walked home from a friend’s birthday party, and then raping her repeatedly over a number of hours in September 2020, in a case that shocked Germany’s second-largest city.
Spanish news agency EFE reports the German Ministry of Justice as stating that four of the defendants hold German citizenship and reside in Hamburg, while the others have Afghan, Armenian, Kuwaiti, Montenegrin and Iranian nationality. Two others were listed as having “uncertain nationality” that would need to be clarified by the courts. Local publication Hamberger Morgenpost later reported that four were from Hamburg, and that the others had Armenian, Egyptian, Iranian, Kuwaiti and Polish nationality.
Because at the time of the offence the perpetrators were all under 20 they were subject to the country’s juvenile law, which meant the public were excluded from the criminal proceedings. During the trial the court heard how the size of the group gradually increased over the course of the two-and-a-half hour attack, as members started inviting others to the scene via online group chats, with one person allegedly filming and then sharing videos of their actions.
It also emerged that the victim was hypothermic when she was found, and had to be rushed to intensive care.
Despite these unspeakably gruesome details, only one of the defendants — the Iranian national — spent any time in jail following the trial. It is perhaps a measure of the type of individual involved that when asked about the rape in court, he replied: “What man doesn’t want that?”
The rest of the attackers, including the one defamed by Maja R, were given suspended sentences, along with probation and some “instructions for educational support”.
According to Nahlah Saimeh, who reportedly appeared before the court as an expert witness, this brutal gang-rape of a defenceless young woman may have been a “means of releasing frustration and anger” stemming from “migration experiences and sociocultural homelessness”.
Maja R has now been sentenced to 48 hours in jail for her comments, in part because she had a previous conviction for theft.
In a suitably dystopian conclusion to this courtroom-based exercise in the transvaluation of basic liberal norms, Josef K — or rather, Maja R — ended up apologising to the young man she had contacted, telling the court: “It didn’t help anyone.” She added that she wanted to go back to college and study to become a paediatric nurse.
Hamburg authorities are now investigating around 140 more suspects for allegedly insulting or threatening the gang rapists, with 100 of the suspects based outside Hamburg.
The case has laid bare Germany’s free speech stifling defamation laws, which criminalise causing offence with even mild slurs like “idiot”. Breaking the law can lead to punishment of up to two years in prison.
In German criminal and defamation law, the concept of “personal honour” holds particular importance as the fundamental principle underlying the protection not just of an individual’s objective reputation and social status (i.e., “external honour”) but also their subjective sense of dignity and value (i.e., “inner honour”).
Understood in this context, Maja R’s private WhatsApp message was a violation of the convicted gang-rapist’s “inner honour”.
Various offences of defamation are standardised in the country’s Criminal Code, including insult (§185), defamation (§186) and slander (§187). What they all have in common is that they protect “personal honour” and criminalise its deliberate violationby another person.
It isn’t hard to discern the influence on this legal framework of German philosophical idealism and … radical subjectivism.
While it’s true that “value judgements” — i.e., personal opinions — receive some protection under Article 5 of the German Constitution (Grundgesetz), which guarantees the right to freedom of expression, a limit is reached in the form of “defamatory criticism”, which is understood as any insulting statement that no longer serves to discuss the matter at hand, but only to defame and disparage one’s interlocutor.
Worth reading in full.
