Ralf Ludwig is a German lawyer and initiator of the Center for the Reappraisal, Clarification,
Legal Prosecution and Prevention of Crimes against Humanity due to the Corona Measures (ZAAVV).
On the eve of the filing of almost 600 criminal charges with the Federal Public Prosecutor's
Office in Karlsruhe, Ralf Ludwig conducted an interview
with Kla.TV, which contributes to general education on human rights.
Mr. Ludwig, many German doctors and a judge were caught up in the German
justice system because of their critical attitude towards the corona measures.
The consequences were a professional ban, imprisonment and loss of livelihood.
Doesn't this raise doubts about the German judiciary as an independent authority within the state?
Yes, that is even more than doubt. So the German judiciary is certainly not independent.
It doesn't make independent judgments either, but judges according to a narrative
- a narrative that is predetermined and that runs through all areas of society.
So the judiciary is not now outside society,
but the judiciary is part of society.
And within the judiciary and within the public prosecutor's office and within the legal profession, this coronavirus narrative has simply prevailed.
And accordingly, those who are critical are criminalized and persecuted.
I sometimes say that in court too.
I say in court, here opinions, here scientific opinions, here a medical treatment
method is being criminalized, which is actually the original task of the
doctor to decide what is right.
And there are judges who then virtually dictate to a doctor, for example,
how to make a mask certificate.
And yes, in principle you can only say that I also dare to doubt whether
the rule of law worked before the coronavirus crisis.
But the coronavirus crisis has clearly shown that it does not work and that it is not independent.
Yes, thank you very much for the explanation.
If I may ask you personally, what does a judge say when you ask him a question like that?
Does he respond to it at all or is it ignored again?
Sometimes it is ignored.
So there are very different judges. The judiciary also reflects society.
There are judges with whom you can certainly argue.
There are judges who say, well, basically we would say the same thing, or I would say
you are right, but the law or the regulations say otherwise
and I have to abide by them.
There are judges who completely ignore this.
There are judges who take my word for it.
A judge in Rostock, that was really bad, he even said to me that he didn't accept ...
I hadn't put on a mask because the mask requirement had already been lifted.
But he really wanted the mask.
And this judge said he didn't even accept that I was a defense lawyer.
So as a defense attorney, I'm actually protected;
For good historical reasons in Germany, I am protected in the courtroom.
And this judge then said, I do not recognize your status as a defence lawyer and will
have you taken into custody if necessary.
So relatively hard. And there are judges who react very, very nervously.
So they start ... well, one judge constantly picked up the phone, held
it to her ear, hung it up again, picked it up again and so on.
It went back and forth with the phone all the time.
And then they rummage through some papers, the judges run out, then back in again.
They're already getting nervous because we're holding a mirror up to them, of course.
We are not the only ones, but we critical lawyers hold a mirror up to them.
And if they were to sort things out according to the law,
they wouldn't do what they do.
And that means, as I like to say again and again, that people strive for coherence.
This means that what you think and how you act must be consistent.
And if that's not the case, you get sick, for example.
And the judges, they just don't act coherently, because they actually know that they are doing the wrong thing and do it anyway.
Very interesting point. Very interesting point.
This leads me to question two, because the coronavirus crisis has made it clear that legislation, the judiciary
and police power have obviously taken on a life of
their own instead of serving the population. Yes, all power should come from the people.
How could it come to such a pass that a judge acts in such a way that the police,
in principle every single area, seems to be infiltrated somewhere?
Who is the driving force in the background?
Purely in your personal opinion ? The driving force in the background?
So first of all, we can say relatively soberly that there are lobbyists, there are interests, there is the pharmaceutical
industry, there is the arms industry, there is the financial complex.
So these are different interests that naturally exert a massive
influence on politics and society.
Now, for example, with the coronavirus crisis, you can clearly see that the pharmaceutical
industry was one of the driving forces.
And of course we are also undergoing social change.
We are simply in a digital revolution.
Society is changing incredibly fast and what is happening now is my explanation,
but of course everyone can see it differently
... I agree with Vera Birkenbihl. It's like a supermarket.
I offer an idea that can be shared or not.
But I believe that it is always the case that politics adapts
to the economic balance of power.
And we now have global economic power relations, so
a global economy cannot in principle tolerate state barriers.
And that means they are also looking for ways to break down these state barriers.
And one way of doing this is through healthcare policy.
As we can see, we can achieve this standardization wonderfully through health policy.
We suddenly have a QR code, we have a standardized identification number.
The WHO treaty, the pandemic treaty, is an attempt
to create a uniform, globally standardized regulation.
And if this goes through, in fact, if this WHO pandemic treaty goes through, then for the
first time we will have a uniform, global standard worldwide that is applied in all countries,
and then - we also know who is behind the WHO, how the WHO is financed - then in principle
the pharmaceutical industry will actually have a worldwide power of intervention.
You have to imagine that.
In other words, the nation state is eliminated at that moment.
And that is what is happening, I think that is what we are experiencing right now.
And we, who are on the street, who are critical, we certainly want things to be different.
We may not be able to stop globalization as it is, but we
can of course stop or change the way it is implemented.
In other words, the democratic implementation of what you just said, that
all power comes from the people.
If the WHO pandemic treaty prevails, then power will no longer emanate from the people, then not
even the people's representatives will be asked, but then power will suddenly emanate from a few
who have power over such a non-democratically legitimized organization as the WHO, they will
suddenly have power, they will be the sovereign, so to speak, because they can also decide on the
state of emergency, as Carl Schmitt said.
The sovereign is the one who decides on the state of emergency.
And that means we have a complete shift in power from a nation-state structure,
which was previously necessary in the capitalist world, to a global political power structure
that is not controlled in the way that a global financial or economic
structure simply needs.
That's what's happening right now. My explanation. Very interesting.
So you can understand that very, very well. We had started somewhere during Corona.
Ultimately, it is also the topic that dominates this interview.
You spoke earlier about lobbyists from various sectors, including weapons, etc.
You can already see that it is more extensive.
And I think it's a global problem.
It is not a national problem that can be limited to one country somewhere.
There's a certain drama in there somewhere.
And then you also just said that the WHO treaty, the pandemic treaty, if it comes
about, can you give the viewer an assessment?
What do you think? Is there a chance that it could tip over?
Or is the possibility rather unlikely?
As far as I can see, the countries of the global South are currently
quite opposed to this.
They are also very critical of the whole vaccination issue because, in principle, I would say
that the medical benefits in the global South have not been benefits, but the global South has
more or less been the test laboratory.
Now, for the first time, the test laboratory has been rolled out
worldwide with mRNA technology.
But there is still a lot more skepticism.
So this skepticism towards global pharmaceutical companies is naturally
much greater in Africa than in Europe.
And the African states have already indicated that they will not agree to this.
In other words, I don't think there will be unanimity.
However, we also have to fight for it.
I find it very worrying, but no longer surprising, that the German government in particular and possibly
also the German parliament are so willing to give up their own sovereignty and the
sovereignty of Germany on this issue.
Yes, very nice. Thank you very much for your comments. You can do very well with that.
In order to reset the arc of tension, here is our situation: Tomorrow is the big day.
What chances do you think there are of adequate processing of the 599 criminal charges filed with the
Federal Public Prosecutor's Office for violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
Section 7 of the International Criminal Code in connection with the coronavirus vaccination
requirement for medical staff and members of the German Armed Forces?
What do you think?
If I can come back to what I said before: What is happening
right now is basically a culture war between those who oppose the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
is a universal declaration of individual human rights.
That is your right, my right, the right of us all.
Each of us has individual fundamental rights from birth.
So we come into the world as human beings and, depending on how you want to see it,
whether you want to see it religiously, we come into the world as a divine being.
And we are unassailable for the time being.
First of all, as human beings, we are in the world as we are and can do what we want.
And then, of course, we live together in communities.
And that means that in the communities we more or less agree that we have
a certain way of living together.
In this form of cohabitation, you give up certain freedoms, namely those
where you restrict other people.
And that is more or less an agreement that we make.
But you do not give the community, the representatives of this community, the rulers
of this community the right over your life.
You do not give up the right to decide about your health, for example, but that is your right,
which you keep for yourself and which you never give to anyone else in this
social contract to decide.
That is your individual right for now.
And the absolute individual right is your individual right to life, that no one may seek to take your
life and that no one may seek to take your health.
And we are now trying to transform this into collective rights.
Suddenly the collective, the community, is much more important than you.
That's exactly what we've now seen with corona.
All of a sudden, a Federal Constitutional Court and a Federal
Administrative Court stand up and say: "We are weighing things up - on the one hand many people
die and on the other hand only a few die if we force them or oblige
them to be vaccinated.
But the person who dies, you or I for example, is a person who has this individual right.
And the state does not have the right to interfere with this individual right.
And that, of course, hinders global political power or the global quest for political power.
This requires collective power.
It doesn't need me as an individual to fight back, but basically says that I should function
within this society in the way that is required of me, in the way that makes the most economic sense,
so to speak, that I have to function.
In other words, the attempt that is happening right now is that these individual basic rights
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - which, by the way, was proclaimed
in New York on December 10, 75 years ago - are being weakened.
This is exactly what is being argued here. We have experienced this over the last three years.
This is a fight against our individual rights.
And those who violate our individual rights and actually carry out attacks on
the civilian population, which ultimately lead to people dying, people suffering serious
damage to their health or people being persecuted by losing basic rights
such as their right to carry out their work, which we have in the medical field.
Then this is also sanctioned within the framework of international criminal law, because international
criminal law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights still provide for individual rights.
And that is what we are trying to combat and that is the message we want to
send out, especially with this criminal complaint, that we are saying;
Hey, those who have acted here in the last three years, this is not just a political view, this
is not just the opinion, well, you can vaccinate or not, but this is an attack on humanity
as such and if you look at it cleanly, soberly, legally, that's what it is.
So they knew beforehand that a certain number of people would die.
They knew that.
They knew that a certain number of people would suffer serious illnesses.
Myocarditis, pericarditis, thrombosis and so on. All of this was known beforehand.
Nevertheless, the politicians, the Bundestag, the Bundesrat and the Federal President, with the support
of the Federal Constitutional Court, have not only made this vaccination voluntary, but
have said that a certain area must, otherwise they will lose their jobs.
In other words, it is a targeted attack on the civilian population.
And it is more than just the interest of the pharmaceutical industry.
If this goes through and if we as a society accept it, then we are in principle
accepting a trade-off between individual life and the collective.
And that must never happen.
And that is a basic rule that we have in our Western civilization.
And that is the change in our Western civilization.
So it is much more.
If we let this argument that we are allowed to kill individual people go through - if you take it a step further, who else are we allowed to kill?
What other thoughts can we have?
Who else could possibly be dangerous for our community?
Yes, there are no more limits. Exactly.
And these borders must never be torn down, which is why I keep saying that the
state must not kill innocent people.
The state is not allowed to take my life because I never gave it the
right to decide over my life.
I never gave him that. You didn't give him that, nobody gave him that.
And yet they did it and they argue it.
And that's why we need this strength now - tomorrow is basically a start, to get
this across to the population and make it clear to people that this is not
just about the question of whether this vaccination was dangerous or not.
Rather, the question is whether in future the state will be allowed to decide which life is not worth living
for a certain other group, regardless of its size.
A very, very interesting starting point.
This means that you move away from the individual fate, the individual suffering, the death or the
side effect and concentrate on the fact that there really is no proportionality, that the state is
not allowed to intervene, that it is not allowed to decide how many people
it saves or how many it loses.
Do I understand that correctly? No, no, we have to be very, very precise.
This is very important at this point. It is not a question of proportionality.
There is no proportionality.
Their lives cannot be put at risk in any proportionality
test.
Your life is worth so much because your individual life belongs to you.
You have not given this to the state as a disposal asset.
The state may, even if it would otherwise save a hundred thousand lives by killing
you, the state may not kill you.
He is not allowed to do so because you did not give him this order.
And that is the power of individual human rights.
The European Court of Human Rights once said this in relation to the ban on torture.
That was in Frankfurt, when this banker's son was kidnapped by a Magnus Gäfgen.
He was the kidnapper, they got hold of him and then thought that
this banker's boy was still alive.
And then the deputy chief of police in Frankfurt said to this Magnus Gäfgen,
I'll get you a special policeman now, he'll inflict incredible pain on you.
It will cause you so much pain without you even seeing it, you've never experienced anything like it in
your life. If you don't tell me where the boy is - because he thought the boy was still alive.
And then he said where the boy was, they found the body there; He was no longer alive.
And then this Magnus Gäfgen took legal action against it all the way to the European Court of Human Rights.
The European Court of Human Rights made it very, very clear at the
time that torture is never permitted.
Never, never, never! We do not open this door.
Torture is not permitted. Not even to save someone else's life.
And then comes this crucial sentence: Not even if a state of national emergency would otherwise be imminent.
So torture is not even allowed to prevent a state of emergency.
And if torture is not allowed, we don't need to talk about killing.
No, not at all. Thank you very much for explaining it again.
This helps you to really understand the core of it again, whatever approach you take.
What will happen to the 599 criminal charges if the Office
of the Attorney General also goes bankrupt?
Is judicial bankruptcy a global problem or is it limited to Germany?
I think we've already touched on part of that.
But it's still very interesting for the viewer to make that clear.
So we are definitely seeing other judgments and other decisions in other countries.
But not now with great force.
It is noticeable that, at least as far as the coronavirus period is concerned, other countries are
now beginning to come to terms with the situation.
So now in England there are proceedings against AstraZeneca.
In America, in Texas, there are proceedings against Pfizer.
This is essentially a case of false advertising, because they have claimed an
effectiveness that does not exist.
We have always mixed up absolute and relative effectiveness.
But I still think that the judiciary as a whole has succumbed to this narrative
worldwide, especially on this issue.
So we do a lot of monitoring, we also have the International Association
of Lawyers for Human Rights.
There are many, many colleagues from all over Europe.
There are many, many countries around the world.
I think there are now 24 or 25 countries that are already involved and they
are all talking about the same problems.
So I don't believe that the judiciary is really independent.
That's not what you want, quite the opposite.
Attempts are being made to make the judiciary more dependent on political decisions,
because it is then of course easier to enforce political decisions.
Yes, very interesting.
And that means, to come back to the 599 criminal charges, we are all with
you in terms of logic. I think you can understand that very well.
But should the judiciary simply, I say, not accept it if they were to simply say,
we reject this, it won't happen here, we won't accept these criminal charges.
What would be your next step? Do you already have plans?
Yes, yes. So first of all, of course, it's also about educating the population.
So of course this criminal complaint will also be published, and colleagues will also get it.
Many lawyers will also have to deal with this.
The criminal complaint is relatively simple, very simple in principle.
I take the International Criminal Code and subsume that by.
And that's what the Attorney General would have to do.
So if the Federal Public Prosecutor General is not investigating now, that is basically a sign
that the state does not want to act in this area.
That is also a sign to the outside world.
We can't look at the whole thing from a purely legal perspective; we have to look at it politically.
And the political wind is changing right now.
So we actually have a situation where the political wind is changing.
We see this in the polls in Germany.
It is only a matter of time before the AfD is also ahead of the CDU in the nationwide polls.
So the gap is getting smaller and smaller.
So that means something is definitely happening.
Regardless of how you feel about the AfD, you can see that things
are changing politically in Germany.
In other words, the strength of a party that is framed as right-wing by all means of the state power
apparatus, but which is nevertheless getting stronger and stronger, indicates
that we have a social change.
And this social change is also necessary. We see it in Italy, for example.
There has been a change and
the former health minister is under investigation in Italy.
In other words, I cannot say whether the Attorney General
will investigate or not.
However, we don't currently have a Federal Public Prosecutor General.
The current one became a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court a week ago.
He now has the Second Senate.
This means that the Second Senate is also politically in your pocket, I say.
A bit succinctly, Mr. Harbarth, who has already moved directly from the Bundestag to the
Constitutional Court, sits in the First Senate.
And the Attorney General, Mr. Frank, who now sits in the Second Senate, was,
I always say, Söder's man in Berlin.
And more of a politician than a lawyer. He is of course a lawyer, but more of a politician.
The problem for the Attorney General's Office is that if it does not investigate, this opens
the way to the International Criminal Court.
So that means that the German Federal Public Prosecutor's Office has to think
carefully about whether we want to keep these investigations into these alleged crimes in Germany
in order to possibly have our finger on them.
Or do we allow these proceedings to then go to The Hague and possibly be investigated
internationally in The Hague, because African
states, for example, could have an interest in supporting these criminal charges, especially
in the current dispute, for example as an argument against
this WHO treaty.
And if it is supported, the rules are just a little different in The Hague.
So then we have a better chance of it being treated.
And that means that the Attorney General's Office must also make political decisions here.
They will certainly not actually want it, just as the public prosecutor's offices in Germany have generally
dropped these proceedings time and again.
But this procedure in particular, which has been relatively soberly analyzed from a legal point of view, which in
my view is relatively clear from a legal point of view, not to investigate it further now, but to actually hand it over
to the international investigators, that is a consideration that must be made by
the Federal Minister of Justice, who is the superior of the Federal Public Prosecutor General.
This is of course a political story. And I'm very excited about that.
But the discussion on this topic alone is so important and so big that I believe and am convinced
that it will be more difficult to implement this change from individual rights to collective
rights that they are planning.
Because people are simply becoming more alert and listening more closely.
I realize that many, many people understand that.
This argument that the state must not kill innocent people - even those who were in favor of compulsory
vaccination suddenly stand in front of me and say, yes, yes, it was only a few.
Then I say, yes, yes, some of them are real people.
And real people must not die as a result of a measure taken by the state.
The state is not allowed to do that. And then people withdraw further and further.
So this argument really does work.
In my private life, I would always bring the discussion back to this one point:
The state must not kill innocent people!
If anyone comes and wants to discuss these things, no matter what it is, it's always
about, is the state killing innocent people?
You can apply that to anything. You can also apply that to war.
Even now, the situation in Gaza, in Israel, is exactly the same.
So the state is not allowed to kill innocent people there either.
Of course a state is allowed to defend itself against a terrorist attack.
But of course the state is not allowed to kill civilians and innocent people.
Here, too, we see a redefinition.
It is now always claimed as if this were possible.
But no, that is not permissible, that is not possible.
You are not allowed to kill civilians. And you must not attack targets where civilians are suspected.
So civilians can be collateral damage under international law, but
not that you actually go there with your eyes open, where you say, yes,
they are hiding behind civilians.
If terrorists are hiding behind civilians, then as a civilized
state I am not allowed to shoot.
Because I'm not allowed to kill these civilians.
And once you realize that a state is not allowed to kill innocent people - once
you realize that, in every situation, then the discussion is always different.
And you can try it out.
Try talking to the many people who were in favor of the vaccination, for example, regardless
of the question of whether this vaccination is now a gene therapy, which is very likely, whether,
as I said, there were all these abuses in the approval procedures,
what all went wrong - always trace it back to this one point.
But if the state makes it compulsory, is the state allowed to kill an innocent
person from your point of view?
And when people then start to think about it, because as a consequence they are saying
that every state can decide who is actually a danger to my state, to the collective,
and then I can kill them?
No! And then a lot becomes clearer.
It is very logical and, above all, very, very practical to take this with you.
And I thought it was great that you applied it again to different crises.
Corona really is an example of what is happening right now.
And globally, we have a few other problems.
But I think it's so nice that you really get to the heart of the matter, to this one
point and say that the state must not kill.
We'll take that with us, we'll pass it on to every viewer who
is watching this from somewhere.
That is an argument that I think we can put forward.
And we can really get this out into the regulars' tables, discussion forums or
wherever. Thank you very much, Mr. Ludwig, for the interview. Yes, thank you.
That you are always fighting for this clarification.
And we send you lots of strength for tomorrow, for the important day, the
handover of the criminal charges.
Yes, thank you. Thank you too.