The Oury Jalloh case made headlines in 2005: the asylum seeker burned to death in a police drunk cell. The investigators have completed their work. Karlsruhe has now decided to do so.
According to the Federal Constitutional Court, the fact that the investigators filed the case of the asylum seeker Oury Jalloh, who was burned to death in a police cell in 2005, does not violate the Basic Law.
According to information from Thursday, the highest German court did not accept a constitutional complaint from Jalloh’s brothers for a decision. It is true that this person has a constitutional right to effective criminal prosecution. “The relevant decision of the Naumburg Higher Regional Court takes this sufficiently into account,” said the court in Karlsruhe. (Az. 2 BvR 378/20)
More than 18 years ago, the man from West Africa died tied up on a mattress in the cell in Dessau in Saxony-Anhalt. Jalloh was drunk and on drugs. It is still unclear whether he set fire to the mattress himself.
The circumstances of death are considered unexplained even after two regional court processes. According to the authorities, Jalloh set the fire himself, although his hands and feet were tied. A police officer was convicted in 2012 for failing to ensure the Sierra Leonean man was properly supervised. In a 300-page investigation report, two special investigators found numerous errors by the police and other authorities.
Several initiatives, friends and family of the deceased speak of “murder” and of “obvious abuses and contradictions in the field of police work”. They are calling for investigations into suspected police officers and had commissioned their own fire reports, among other things. On January 7th, the anniversary of his death, hundreds of people demonstrated under the motto “Oury Jalloh – That was murder!” in memory of the man.
The public prosecutor’s office in Halle ended the investigation into the case in October 2018 because they did not expect any clarification. The Attorney General later confirmed that investigations did not need to be reopened. It cannot be proven that police officers or other people set fire to Jalloh, it said.
On October 22, 2019, the Higher Regional Court of Naumburg rejected an application for a court decision that was made against it as inadmissible and stated, among other things, that the Attorney General’s Office had correctly denied sufficient suspicion. Jalloh’s brother filed a constitutional complaint against this and claimed that his right to effective criminal prosecution, effective legal protection, arbitrary decisions and a fair hearing had been violated.
However, the Federal Constitutional Court did not agree. The judges in Naumburg, for example, did not fail to recognize the importance of the fundamental right to life and the constitutional requirements for the effective investigation of deaths, it said. In addition, the court correctly pointed out in its decision that the plaintiff’s statements lacked a description of “which police officers are said to have set the fire and on the basis of which evidence a relevant proof should be possible”.
Source: Stern
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