km. Germany is a parliamentary republic. The German parliament, i.e. the German Federal Parliament (German Bundestag), is the only government body on the federal level, onto whose composition the citizens have a direct influence through elections – even though the influence is less direct than that of the Swiss one for example, due to the nature of the German sort of right to vote.
Therefore, according to the constitution, the members of the German Federal Parliament are endowed with excellent political rights that extend from legislation to constant control of the government. An important tool of control are different kinds of queries that can be handed in by one or several members of parliament to the government and which have to be answered within reasonable time.
For theses written queries posed by individual members of parliament the guidelines of the German Federal Parliament have the following provision: “Each Member of the Bundestag has the right to address four written questions to the Federal Government per month. […] The Federal Government responds to these questions within a week”.
At the beginning of January the representative of the AFD-fraction, Petr Byston, posed the following question to the Federal Government: “Which wars (international armed conflicts) since 1991 need to be qualified as illegal according to the judgement of international law by the Federal Government and which state would have to be classified as an aggressor according to the judgement of the Federal Government?”
In addition, Byston referred to a statement made by the SPD town association Göttingen on 28 November 2022, in which the then ongoing waves of attack by the Turk army “on all Kurdish territories” are declared as “brutal and against international law”.
On 16 January 2023 the representative received the following written reply by a state secretary of the Federal Foreign Office:
“Dear Mr. representative, your question [here follows the question of the representative], I answer to your question as follows: The Federal Government only conducts assessments of international armed conflicts in the light of current events, as is the case with the illegal Russian war against the Ukraine. A retrospective assessment according to international law of all wars i.e. all international armed conflicts since 1991 carried out by the Federal Government does not exist. This would exceed the time provided for answering a written query and, furthermore, couldn’t claim completeness.” (translated by Current Concerns) •
Source: www.nachdenkseiten.de of 18 January 2023
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