How do I file a criminal complaint in Germany? How can I lay a criminal complaint before the governmental prosecutor according to § 158 (Strafanzeige; Strafantrag) StPO? Need I follow a particular format? where do I send it? Can I submit an anonymous complaint, and if so does the prosecutor take those seriously? I read the following tweet from Henry B. Poquelin*: "Fakt bleibt, man muss Positionen und Personal der Rechtspopulisten attackieren,weil sie gestrig,intolerant, rechtsaußen und gefährlich sind!" I hate AfD and its politics, but still I don't like the call for criminal violence against people and property. I thought of a prosecution based on §111 and §130 StGB. Well, I will certainly not prosecute him, but I still would like to write a correct letter to the government lawyers and knowing how to send it anonymously to them. *I'm using a pseudonym here to avoid listing the name of the famous SPD politician. I don't want to start a witch hunt on him.
You could do that online, this website will help you with that: http://www.online-strafanzeige.de/ Also, just go to the police... They must accept your complaint and will check it. Also they can tell you wether it is likely that the complaint will lead to a lawsuit or not.
The &quot;Hitlergruß&quot; In germany, statements and even gestures that are identified with the nazi ideology are a criminal offence under StGB §86a (Dissemination of Means of Propaganda of Unconstitutional Organizations) and StGB $130 (Volksverhetzung), leaving a gap only for art, science, research or teaching. This makes the &quot;Hitlergruß&quot; with or without the accompanied statements of &quot;Heil&quot;, &quot;Sieg Heil&quot; or &quot;Heil Hitler&quot; an offense that can end you in prison unless you can point to one of the allowed exceptions: up to three years for the dissemination of means of propaganda and at least three months but at max 5 years for Volksverhetzung, especially §130 (3) &amp; (4), the general sentence frame thus would be three months to three years, unless other factors allow for more - the typical sentence is 6 months or a quite hefty fine (some have been known to be 5000 €) austria bans the same gesture and sentences via Verbotsgesetz §3g as promoting the national socialist ideology through means that are not in §3a-f (which span more or less trying to keep the nazi party alive and violent crimes) and punishes it with (theoretically) up to 10 years and for extreme cases double that. In switzerland, the gesture is a hate crime if you promote the nazi ideology with it. slovakia as well es the czech-republic also deem this gesture, with or without the words, a criminal offence (up to 5 years in both parts of former czechoslovakia), sweden deems it a hate crime (see here) and italy deems it the same if associated with the Italian Fascist Party. Several other jurisdictions, including in the united-states, do recognize that performing this form of &quot;speech&quot; can be either a hate crime or an offence against public order of some sort. This makes the gesture of &quot;extending the right arm to neck height and then straightening the hand so that it is parallel to the arm&quot; (and possibly using the 4, 8 or 10 letters together with it) the shortest illegal statement - which atop that is possibly the single statement that is also illegal in the most jurisdictions worldwide and not a true threat.
I have encountered this problem in Pennsylvania. The PA Code requires a District Attorney to approve all private criminal complaints. If the DA declines to prosecute, then an affiant can petition the Court of Common Pleas to review the decision. However the affiant bears the burden of convincing the court that the DA abused his descretion in declining to prosecute, which is a pretty high hurdle. In the United States the only other legal appeal I am aware of is through federal courts under broad federal laws like 18 USC 242 or 42 USC 1983.
In German Law you need to give your agreement ("Willenserklärung") to a contract or in this case terms of service. This is done by telling the other part. In some cases this can also be implied by an action (example: putting your bottle of beer onto the cashiers table is an offer to buy this bottle). As a second criteria a "Willenserklärung" needs to be the exact will of the part that declares its will (the website user in this case) §§ 133, 157 BGB or that the other side (you) could only see so (not the case here as this mainly speaks of content). If you visit a website and there are terms of services, the "Willenserklärung" is only given when the user read and agreed to the terms. If he did not, the terms of service are not applied until the user agrees to them. So I would recommend to block the website until the user agreed (overlay) as you need to proof he did when in court. Additionally there are so called AGB's in Germany. Those are contracts that are used or planed for many (more than 3) uses and set by one side (you). This may apply here, so you need to follow a lot of other rules like making sure the user had access and agreed, then there are many content restrictions and so on... I recommend consulting a German Lawyer specialized on this topic as this is very complex and includes other German laws for Media too, depending on the content of your site and terms. Also note that everything said is only based on my own knowledge and can not be used as safe legal source.
Defamation requires communication to a third-party I can say (or write) anything I want about a person directly to that person and, unless it is a threat, they have no recourse at all. I can call them a liar, a thief, a Nazi, or a goat fornicator. Of course, I have to be careful – calling them a “bastard” might be a slur on their mother communicated to a third-party (them) which would give her a right to sue although that would require a literal and largely archaic use of the term. That said, you do need to check with your lawyer if you can redact names in the face of a subpoena - complying with a legal obligations is a legitimate use of personal data under GDPR.
The General Rule: The Prosecutor And Not The Crime Victim Decides You are correct that this is mostly wrong. Pressing charges is something that happens. But, this simply consists of making a report to law enforcement about an incident and asking that the prosecutor either directly, or indirectly through a request directed to the law enforcement officer to whom a report is made, to pursue criminal charges in the case. But, this request has no binding or legal effect, even though many law enforcement agencies and prosecutors offices have a formal or informal unwritten policy of honoring a crime reporting victim's wishes whenever possible. In the United States, a prosecutor can commence a criminal case against someone without consulting a victim of a crime, or over the objections of the victim of the crime, and can even (and sometimes does) incarcerate the victim of the crime to force the victim to testify against a criminal defendant (this most often happens in cases of statutory rape, domestic violence and cases involving organized crime or gangs). Likewise, a prosecutor (in the United States) can choose to decline to prosecute a criminal case despite irrefutable evidence tied up with a bow and the pleas of the victim and lots of other members of the general public. (Not all countries are like this. For example, in Germany, some crimes can only be prosecuted with the victim's consent, and within reason a prosecutor is required to prosecute every case in which there is clear evidence that a crime was committed and the victim's consent, if necessary, is present. While Germany is something of an extreme case, it is much closer to the norm than the U.S. is in countries that do not have a common law legal tradition, while the U.S., while an extreme case, is closer to the norm of countries in the common law tradition of British law.) A crime victim's wishes aren't entirely irrelevant in practice. Many states have a &quot;victim's bill of rights&quot; that requires a prosecutor to confer with a victim when possible over whether a criminal case will be commenced against a defendant, and in practice, many prosecutors in ordinary type cases come to think of the victims of crimes, rather than &quot;the People&quot; as their client, even though that isn't technically correct from a legal perspective. Most of the time, a crime victim's wishes will be respected by prosecutors whether conveyed directly to a prosecutor, or indirectly through a law enforcement officer. But, nothing requires either a law enforcement officer or a prosecutor to do so. Law enforcement officers in some ways have even more discretion than prosecutors do and simply don't pass on information about myriad crimes that they have knowledge of and could prove, every day. But, prosecutors can choose to disagree with a law enforcement officer's exercise of discretion when they do know about an incident, either by declining to prosecute a crime, or by prosecuting a crime that law enforcement officers didn't want to prosecute. And, law enforcement officers as a matter of practical reality can be forced by prosecutors to execute search warrants and arrest warrants. Also, it is true that when neither law enforcement or prosecutors know a crime has been committed that they can't prosecute it, and usually, the way that they learn of a crime is that a crime victim reports the crime to law enforcement. The decision to report or not report a crime not known to law enforcement is, in practice, what &quot;pressing charges&quot; or &quot;not pressing charges&quot; usually means and this does, in practice, constitute a veto power over further criminal proceedings arising from an incident, even though the language used implies a more formal step in a legal process than it does. Exceptions To The General Rule N.B. Notwithstanding the foregoing, there are a few exceptions to the general rule. A handful of U.S. states, so far as I know, all on the East Coast (and also England and South Africa), allow individuals who are crime victims to directly commence the prosecution of minor crimes in a court of law without the intervention of law enforcement or a prosecutor, or grand jury, often without an attorney. Usually, if this is done, the prosecuting attorney's office can take over the case from the private individual litigant if they choose to do so. A discussion of the historical practice with case citations can be found here. In the roughly half of U.S. states and in the federal system, where felony criminal charges must be brought via a grand jury indictment before they can be tried, a so called &quot;runaway grand jury&quot; can bring criminal charges that the prosecutor has a duty to make a good faith effort to prosecute, without the request of the prosecutor convening the grand jury. For example, in a recent Alabama case, prosecutors went to a grand jury seeking felony charges against someone who shot a pregnant woman, and the grand jury decided to indict the woman who was shot for manslaughter on the theory that she caused the death of her unborn child by starting a fight that led to the shooting. The prosecutor's office once it had control of the case, and had observed the public outrage over the decision, then dismissed those charges. There are a few states where a crime victim who is dissatisfied with a prosecutor or law enforcement officer's exercise of discretion can apply to a court to have a disinterested and uninvolved attorney appointed as a special prosecutor to review the facts of an alleged crime and decide independently regarding whether criminal charges should be pressed in a case where law enforcement and the prosecutor's office declined to do so. This is most frequently invoked when the alleged perpetrator of the crime is connected to law enforcement or the prosecutor's office. Also, just become a prosecutor declines to bring a criminal case despite a crime victim's desire to &quot;press charges&quot;, this doesn't mean that the victim can't sue the person who committed the crime for money damages (including punitive damages in many cases) from the same conduct that constituted the crime. In big dollar cases involving fraud or theft from a small number of affluent victims (a kind of case I frequently handle in my law practice), this happens all the time.
It's called police and prosecutorial discretion to discern when to arrest and prosecute; and that situation in particular is also the result of a decision of the jury of the court of public opinion. Permits are required to sell on the street in Oakland. But not everyone who sells has a permit, and not everyone who is confronted about not having a permit is arrested and prosecuted. There are simply too many potential cases to prosecute. And, the police officer has the discretion to ticket or not. When you get pulled over while driving or riding a bike, you don't always get a ticket, since the officer has the option of discretion. When the officer responded and found an eight year-old selling water, he obviously was aware of the fact that it was a violation. But he was also aware of the court of public opinion. What is it going to look like if he arrests an eight year old and their parent? Allison Ettel was right, in a purely legal sense, to make the report. And technically, the child (and adult) needed a permit. And could have been ticketed and prosecuted. But it was Ettel was tried and convicted in the court of public opinion, and she lost her case. Happens a lot.
While German law indeed requires providing correct contact information it does not require the recipient to answer queries. It is there so that you can submit legal notifications. In your case I wouldn't be so sure that the information is not correct. However, even if the contact information is incorrect, there is not much you can do about it. This is reserved to the following groups by § 8 Abs. 3 UWG: every competitor; associations with legal personality which exist for the promotion of commercial or of independent professional interests, so far as a considerable number of entrepreneurs belong thereto, and which distribute goods or services of the same or similar type on the same market, provided such associations are actually in a position, particularly in terms of their personnel, material and financial resources, to pursue the tasks, under their memoranda of association, of promoting commercial or independent professional interests, and so far as the contravention affects the interests of their members; qualified entities that prove that they are entered on the list of qualified entities pursuant to section 4 of the Injunctions Act or on the list of the Commission of the European Communities pursuant to Article 4 of Directive 98/27/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 May 1998 on injunctions for the protection of consumer interests (OJ Number L 166 page 51); Chambers of Industry and Commerce or Craft Chambers. Unless you are a competitor you are out of luck. The hoster or other providers can't do anything and don't need to, as they are not required to check legality of their user's websites. It doesn't really matter where you are by the way for these laws.