Judges who call their own profession criminal

There are confessions that no one wants to hear because they are formulated too matter-of-factly. A retired criminal judge, who had served at the Stuttgart Regional Court for thirty-one years, wrote a letter to the editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2008, documenting what he had witnessed over three decades: system-organized violations of the law, colleagues who could simply be called "criminals," and, at the end of a long career, a "deep disgust for my fellow judges."

This isn't the burnout rant of a disgruntled civil servant. This is a diagnosis made by someone who was inside the system and knew the files. The criminals in their robes remained sacrosanct because they acted on orders from above or were protected so that the reputation of the apparatus wouldn't be tarnished. Taking action against such colleagues was impossible, he noted, because the system protected itself from exposure through consistent manipulation. Mind you, this isn't some angry citizen saying this on Telegram. This is someone who himself delivered judgments in the name of the people for decades. And he's not the only one.

The apparatus that doesn't touch itself
Anyone who believes that deliberate perversion of justice is punishable has mistaken the German Criminal Code for a book of fairy tales. On paper, perversion of justice is, according to Section 339 of the German Criminal Code A crime, a prison sentence of one to five years, and a conviction automatically disqualifies the judge from office. This is precisely why it is practically never handed down. The Federal Court of Justice has interpreted the offense so narrowly that only "elementary violations of the law" and "blatant acts of arbitrariness" fit the definition. Anyone who secretly falsifies the grounds for a judgment but credibly claims they merely wanted to conceal their own laziness goes unpunished. According to legal literature, the number of convictions can be counted on one hand.

Added to this is the so-called preclusive effect, a legal marvel of self-serving power. It ensures that a judge can only be prosecuted for forgery or obstruction of justice if they are simultaneously proven to have perverted the course of justice. Since the latter is never achieved, the rest is rendered meaningless. Critics have called this a judicial privilege for decades , and they are right: the judiciary does not act against itself. It has constructed a norm that looks like a sword but functions like an umbrella for its own profession.

Stuttgart, where people used to look
That this realization matured earlier in Stuttgart than elsewhere is no coincidence. Anyone who followed the train station project and its legal aftermath from the inside witnessed one legal violation after another being brushed aside. Another retired presiding judge from the same chamber happened upon the clearing of the palace gardens just a few weeks before his retirement, on September 30, 2010, and experienced firsthand... how the state attacked its own citizens with water cannons and pepper sprayA pensioner almost lost his eyesight in the incident. Five years later, the Stuttgart Administrative Court ruled that the operation was simply unlawful.

And then? Nothing. The lawyer filed a complaint against a senior public prosecutor for perjury and obstruction of justice, supported by videos and witnesses. Complaint filed, dismissed, repeated. The politically responsible investigation was delayed until the statute of limitations had conveniently expired . His conclusion after a lifetime in a judicial robe is as dry as it is devastating: With a judicial system in which public prosecutors are bound by instructions and have to look up to their superiors, Germany wouldn't even be admitted to the EU today . As a young investigating judge, he recounted, he once ordered a search of a prominent politician's home, whereupon he was told that his career path was over. Anyone who criticizes the system doesn't rise to the top. Incidentally, the very first judge noted this in another letter to the editor back in 1981.

And Switzerland? Only clean in glossy brochures.
Anyone breathing a sigh of relief because this all sounds like Germany should pause for a moment. Switzerland has a peculiarity that exists nowhere else in Europe: Anyone who wants to become a judge must belong to a political party, is elected according to party proportionality, and then pays that party a salary for years afterward. Mandate tax — between 3000 and 10,000 francs per year, totaling roughly 2,5 to 3 million francs annually across the federal and cantonal levels, flowing from the bench to party coffers. The former president of the Zurich High Court calls a spade a spade: the party tax functions as protection money, or "pizzo" in mafia jargon. Those who pay continue to receive support and are usually re-elected; those who don't pay, however, are less certain. The Council of Europe Group against Corruption Switzerland has been criticized for this for years., without consequence. And if a federal judge ever rules against the party line, his own parliamentary group promptly recommends his removal from office — happened with a Valaisan, who then openly accused his party of instrumentalizing the judiciary. Running for re-election every six years, dutifully paying the dues: that's not how you buy justice in this country, you rent it temporarily.

White collars, clean hands
Let's call a spade a spade: This is white-collar crime, committed by people who, in a normal trial, would be in the dock. The real scandal isn't the single perverse ruling. The scandal is that for decades a country has been governed and judged by a caste that never serves time for the very same behavior it punishes its citizens with the full force of the law. And this very same caste then goes on to wag its finger at the innocent population, telling them what they can and can't do, which opinions are acceptable, and which parties they absolutely mustn't vote for.

It's the same old story: the common people are preached to the choir while the preachers themselves drink the wine. Citizens are expected to be law-abiding down to the last decimal point, yet they are provided with a system that has turned its own adherence to the law into mere decoration. Anyone who now considers this a conspiracy theory should ask themselves why a state governed by the rule of law, which has to beg for its own justice , is simultaneously so astonishingly good at silencing anyone who asks too many questions. The state wants your name so that you'll finally be quiet —not your respect, which it forfeited long ago.

Whether in Stuttgart or the Federal Parliament, whether in academic robes or parliamentary taxes: it's always the same patterns, the same diagnosis across decades and national borders. This isn't an unfortunate isolated incident; it's the blueprint. A system that declares its own criminals untouchable and binds its judges to political parties with protection money is no longer a state governed by the rule of law, but merely a well-lit stage set. When even the men who have condemned in the name of the people ultimately feel nothing but disgust for their own profession, the question is no longer whether the law is being bent. The only question is whether it ever truly stood upright, on either side of the border!