Germany’s plans for cannabis legalization will create a two-tiered marijuana policy, with legal access and immunity from prosecution for some, and continued criminalization for people from racialized, migrantized, and other frequently-policed groups.

Justice Collective is Hiring!

Along with partners (RE)Claim/MCDS (France), Hungarian Helsinki Committee (Hungary), Justice Collective urges the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing and the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights to demand a Europe-wide stop to the criminalization of poverty, racist police practices, and debtor’s prisons.

Visit here for links to sources and resources featured in Justice Collective’s Instagram educational series, “Why We Need Abolition: Policing, Punishment, and Prisons in Germany”, based on its report with the Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie.

Justice Collective is launching a new research project to understand racism in courts and in the criminal legal system, starting in April with court-watching in Berlin.

Justice Collective is Hiring!

Analysis of Germany’s coalition agreement on issues of policing, punishing, and anti-racism.

This event will no longer take place on December 6 because of COVID-19. We will reschedule soon.

On November 26, 2021 from 19:00 – 20:30, Justice Collective will present an overview of policing and punishment in Germany.

In Lacatus v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights held that a Swiss law punishing begging with high fines and prison violated a person’s right to dignity because it criminalized poverty. In this briefing, we find that the punishment of poverty detailed in Lacatus is not an anomaly: Switzerland’s courts disparately sentence people with lower incomes, racialized people, and migrants. People charged face serious consequences, including prison.

Analyzing existing research, Justice Collective provides a snapshot of harmful punishment practices across Europe. Our report counters assumptions that states in Europe do not punish very much and that they are free from structural racism in their courts.

Mitali Nagrecha, Coordinator of Justice Collective, wrote for Al Jazeera about how people in Europe should have the right to film the police.