Clarification on the child pornography law

9 comments

1. If you have cp you go to jail. Was always like that and will always be like that.

2. The current law is just poorly written and of course the right-wing liars frame this as “decriminalisation” while it’s the furthest thing from it.

   Currently, if somebody sends CP to a WhatsApp group for example, the police would be obligated to investigate every member. That’s obviously not feasible.

   There are also cases where someone could just forward a picture to report it to and have the people involved also flagged.

   The idea of the change is to just better align the law with reality.

3. The latest law forced courts to prosecute even witnesses and informants, so they‘re changing it back to make sure courts can dismiss cases where there is obviously no fault.

4. kind of a weird question to ask op, if you dont bother with this kind of fucked up shit, why ask this question?

5. They just fixed an unintended consequence of an overzealous change to the law.

   Nothing more.

   The only thing that changed is the minimum penalty. Now it is below 1 year (6months) so a judge can decide to throw out the case for reasons like you mentioned. Or the case of minors “producing casm of themselves”.

   (Judges could have already done this taking into account a lack of “guilt” or even considering an unwritten “less serious case”, but with a zealous prosecutor this likely would not have worked, or would have been very difficult to argue, because the law recently changed to punish all cases harder)

   The important thing is, the maximum penalty stays at 10 years, so the typical cases will not be punished less just because of this change.

   They could have instead added an explicit “less serious case” to the law, but for various reasons they decided against this approach. (Would have looked worse in the boulevard press and could have led to less punishment for “real” cases).
   They could have also tried to amend the law to explicitly handle the problematic cases, but that’s not how german laws generally work, because trying to handle explicit cases tends to lead to unintended outcomes, or not handling cases that should be handled.

   (The law still has other “defects”, but in this atmosphere nobody is going to fix or even discuss them publicly)

6. What is unclear? It was an idiotic conservative law change which is now being fixed.

7. I can’t tell you about the “general feeling” towards this. But it makes sense to me that judges have the possibility to not prosecute people who obviously didn’t use material like this for their own sexual gratification but gathered and forwarded it to protect their children or students, and I don’t think that there are a lot of people who think they should go to jail for this. The law didn’t change the upper range of punishments, so there is no “decriminalisation” of cp per se.

   Seems like another story taken out of context to generate clicks.

8. 1. Stupid politicians raise the minimum sentence for CP to 1 year, making it a “Verbrechen”

   2. Any type of “Verbrechen” can’t be dropped by the prosecution office.

   3. Teacher confiscated nudes of pupils. Technically the teacher is in possession of CP

   4. Prosecuter and judge have to sentence the teacher for possession of CP, despite no wrong doing.

   5. Politicians: “Oh, upsi.” Change the law again

   6. Media: “Oh look, the politicians are lowering the sentences for CP. Fucking pedos”.

9. There was recently a reactionary change to the law that changed the minimum sentence for any posession to 1 year, which meant that informants or people who were sent CP involuntary would have to be prosecuted. This has been reverted. That’s all.