Action Plan against racism and other forms of
discrimination, including homophobia and
transphobia.
TORTURE AND OTHER ILL-TREATMENT
Authorities at both the federal and the state
levels continued to fail to establish any
independent complaints mechanism to
investigate ill-treatment by police.
Civil society organizations continued to
report discriminatory identity checks by
police on members of ethnic and religious
minorities.
In November, the central investigation unit
in Hamburg was investigating complaints
filed against 109 police officers for the
alleged unlawful use of force during protests
against the G20 summit in Hamburg in July.
In eight federal states, police officers
remained under no legal obligation to wear
identification badges. In October, the newly
elected Parliament in North-Rhine
Westphalia repealed the recently introduced
requirement for law enforcement officials in
the federal state to wear identification
badges.
In October, prosecutorial authorities closed
the new investigations opened in May into the
death in custody of Oury Jalloh, a Sierra
Leonean national who died in a fire in a cell
of a police station in Dessau in 2005. In
November, media reports revealed that
months before the investigations were closed,
fire experts meeting in February had
unanimously excluded the possibility of Oury
Jalloh setting fire to himself. In December,
the Minister of Justice of Saxony-Anhalt
newly assigned the investigations to the
Prosecutor General of Naumburg.
ARMS TRADE
The selective post-shipment control system to
improve the monitoring of German small
arms exports to ensure compliance with enduse certificates entered its pilot phase. In
May, a first control mission on the
whereabouts of exported sniper rifles in India
was conducted in agreement with the Indian
authorities.
Amnesty International Report 2017/18
The federal government continued to
license the export of arms and other related
military equipment to countries, such as
India and Turkey, where there was a risk that
such arms could be used to commit or
facilitate serious human rights violations.
CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY
In March, Parliament passed a law
implementing the 2014 EU Directive on nonfinancial reporting, which required certain
large companies to report on the human
rights impacts of their global operations.
However, the law was more limited than the
Directive, requiring companies to report only
on risks that were “very likely to cause severe
negative consequences” on human rights
and only to the extent necessary for an
understanding of their business operations.
There continued to be a lack of a binding
mechanism requiring business enterprises to
exercise due diligence to ensure that they
respect human rights throughout their
operations and supply chain. Access to the
justice system for victims of human rights
abuses by or involving business enterprises
remained burdensome.
RIGHTS OF LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL,
TRANSGENDER AND INTERSEX PEOPLE
In July, the federal Parliament passed a law
granting same-sex couples the right to marry
and to access adoption.
Children and adults with variations of sex
characteristics continued to suffer human
rights violations. Invasive and irreversible
medical procedures carried out on children
with variations of sex characteristics
continued and had lifelong harmful effects.
Guidelines drawn up by intersex activists and
medical professionals for treatment of
individuals with variations of sex
characteristics had not been widely
implemented.
In November, the Federal Constitutional
Court ruled that individuals should be allowed
to choose a legal gender other than male and
female by the end of 2018.
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