Chilling Arrests of Researchers

Der Generalbundesanwalt beim Bundesgerichtshof
c/o Ermittlungsrichter Hebenstreit
Herrenstraße 45
D-76133 Karlsruhe
Germany

It has recently come to my attention through numerous American and European academic organizations that a number of academics in the normal pursuit of their scholarship and research have been arrested and continue to be held as charged with “membership in a terrorist association according to § 129a StGB” (German Penal Code, section 7 on ‘Crimes against Public Order’).

What is especially troubling to me as an Activist or Public Scholar is that Dr. Andrej Holm, Dr. Matthias B., Florian L., Oliver R. und Axel H. were investigated and arrested for the kind of activities that I and most other socially conscious social scientists routinely engage in. Over the course of my career I have engaged in research and writing about Civil Rights for Nonwhite minorities, Affordable Housing, and most recently the rights of the newest immigrants in the United States and abroad. If such work can so easily be presented as "potentially" (therefore actually) criminal then it must follow that critical academic activities of all sorts, including those that are only distantly related to political and social engagement can be horribly transformed, by the State, into crimes of subversion and terrorism. I understand that we live in dangerous and difficult times but such menacing actions by those who are sworn to protect the rights of its citizens must be ever more cautious and reluctant to use its power to take those rights away and cast a chilling shadow across the scholarly community that historically has been a bastion against tyranny.

Sincerely yours,
Jerome Krase, Ph.D.
Emeritus and Murray Koppelman Professor
Brooklyn College
The City University of New York

Source: Jerome Krase | 16.08.2007