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AChancellor Angela Merkel and the prime minister agreed to the winter closure with unusual speed. And no one should step out of line. “We are not discussing exceptions again, but about consistent implementation,” Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) said at last Sunday’s press conference. In Düsseldorf, the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Armin Laschet, seconded: “It was particularly important for us that this happened together, that the same rules apply in all 16 German countries.” The objective should be “not to look for the loophole again.” But North Rhine-Westphalia of all places has only half implemented the contact restrictions.
The federal-state resolution establishes that “private meetings” must “be limited to one’s own home and another home, but in any case to a maximum of five people.” There should only be one exception at Christmas. This is exactly what Laschet announced at his press conference, and this is how his state government officially presents it: “Gatherings are only allowed with members of your own household and another household, up to a maximum of five people,” says one state press release. North Rhine-Westphalia. “In addition, in the period between December 24 and 26, 2020, your own household will be able to meet a maximum of four other people from your closest family circle (…)”.
Allowed, allowed, that sounds like a clear prohibition. But the Crown Protection Ordinance for North Rhine-Westphalia with its nearly 18 million inhabitants contains no legal basis for such a ban. The aforementioned rules can be found there as exceptions to the minimum distance requirement and apply exclusively “in public spaces”. “Therefore, you cannot derive contact restrictions at all from the text of your own apartment,” says legal scholar Andrea Kießling from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the FAZ Make the regulations seem stricter than the legal situation. “
Constitutional lawyer Christoph Möllers of the Humboldt University of Berlin also finds the ordinance “strange” in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Infection Protection Act explicitly allows states to issue contact restrictions for private areas, Möllers told FAZ.
According to the North Rhine-Westphalia ordinance, only “comparable parties and celebrations” are “generally prohibited” and thus also in private, but without specifying a number of participants or defining the term “party”. Does the dance or loud music belong to you? The portion of alcohol? “A Christmas gathering at home would be completely forbidden if it were a party, even if the number of people is below the maximum,” says Kießling, “otherwise it would be completely allowed, without any restriction on the number of people.”
A spokesperson for the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Labor, Health and Social Affairs confirmed to FAZ that only parties are prohibited in private spaces. “In addition, there is an urgent recommendation to observe the rules for public space within its own four walls.” It does not explain why the state government is making an urgent recommendation to the public such as a contact ban.
Things get mixed up in Hesse too
In Hesse, too, contact restrictions only apply to “stays in public spaces”. Yet Prime Minister Volker Bouffier has said it over and over again in his press conferences. In the private sphere, one hopes that people’s common sense will adhere to the rules in their own interest, Bouffier said. It is also in the Hessian Crown Ordinance: a restriction is only “strongly recommended” for private gatherings. On the website of the Hessian state government, things get confused when it says, for example, that gatherings are only allowed in “close family circles” during Christmas.
Bavaria, Berlin and Lower Saxony, on the other hand, regulate contact restrictions by ordinance directly in the apartments. In doing so, they are fully implementing the joint decision of the federal-state conference. In Baden-Württemberg, the government goes one step further and bans all “private gatherings” in public spaces. According to this, not even two mothers who are friends can sit on a park bench to talk. Lawyer Kießling considers this to be legally questionable. “After all, the risk of infection outside is much lower than in closed rooms.” The only exception is “sport and exercise.” If mothers were doing stretching exercises, they would be allowed to meet in the park.
