The season is over. The football fan thinks about how he can bridge the time until the new one. Sure, you could probably watch the European Championships. But you’re not thrilled. Nevertheless, the European Championships should be an opportunity to reflect – about yourself as a football fan and about the sometimes highly problematic surroundings. Because: The repression machine runs and runs.
Let’s take the “Sports Violent Offenders File” – a central police file in which the fan can be entered when he has to hand in his personal details at the train station during an away game. What does this have to do with violence? Nothing. I have been criticizing the file for years; it is unworthy of a constitutional state: no one is informed about the entry, no one is given any information on legal remedies. The consequences of the entry can be significant, for example if the federal police do not let a fan leave the country for a family vacation precisely because he is in the file.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) promptly announced that the entries would be extended to foreign fans during the European Championship. This was a scandal, not least because the coalition agreement between the traffic light coalition states that the files should be reviewed for compliance with the rule of law, deletion periods, transparency and data protection. One and a half years before the next federal election, the coalition is about as far away from this as the DFB presidency is from the fan lawyer.
The “Sport Violence Offenders File” not only needs to be reformed. Its abolition would be the only sensible legal consequence. The file stigmatizes football fans, is not informative, and is an instrument of police arbitrariness. As long as it exists, fans should use the football-free time to request information about themselves and, if necessary, request or sue for the deletion of registered data.
“Let’s play sports!” from the fan lawyer.
