What was the original idea behind the founding of Justizwatch?

Justizwatch emerged in 2014 out of the work of the Campaign for the Victims of Racist Police Violence (KOP) in Berlin. KOP documents and fights racist police violence. This includes accompanying victims to court. KOP activists, especially Biplab Basu, saw the court as an essential institution that helps to enable and maintain racist police violence. However, they had no resources to document the trials themselves. Many of our members were initially students of social work at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences, where Biplab had given a workshop on anti-racist court watching. Because of this connection, our work initially focused on cases related to police violence. We understood court watching as a form of solidarity with those affected, as part of empowerment and as documentation that serves to challenge racist police violence.

How did you proceed?

It took some time to establish ourselves as a group, but soon we had developed a way of working: KOP, the ReachOut counselling centre and the lawyers working with them informed us about upcoming cases. We wrote detailed minutes of the hearings, preferably with the participation of several observers, and then shared these with the affected individuals—who in cases of police violence were usually accused—and with the others mentioned above. We usually published the complete minutes on our blog. In addition, we often published a shorter report: a summary of the case with a few ‘highlights’ that showed how racism manifested in the case. We also sent these out via a newsletter. Later, we also started calling for people to attend trials, in some cases accompanying defendants throughout the procedures, publishing their statements and collecting donations to cover the legal costs together with other groups and organisations. We also conducted interviews for internal use and published texts analysing cases.

How did your understanding of racism in the justice system develop after Justizwatch was founded? Were there particular trials or observations that particularly shaped you?

From the beginning, the knowledge of those affected about racism was central to us. We wanted to document the practices that habitually silence this knowledge in court proceedings. In the beginning, our understanding of racism in court was heavily focused on what happened in the courtroom itself—certain things that were said, gestures, tone of voice and other microaggressions. Some of us may have understood this as discrimination, but also as a way of the court to show racialised, often working-class defendants their place in society. However, Biplab Basu, who was a member of Justizwatch in the early years, brought in the insight that institutional racism is a much more complex phenomenon that functions as an interplay between different institutions. These include, for example, the police, the public prosecutor, judges, the prison and social workers. He spoke of the ‘criminal justice system’. Today, we would be more likely to use the term criminal legal system because of the lack of justice we observed. Analysing the cooperation between the aforementioned actors and implicit assumptions about ‘dangerous groups’ makes it possible to understand why racialised people are often targeted by police violence and are subsequently charged and convicted of resistance, insult or assault.

Observing trials related to the constant police checks in Görlitzer Park further changed our understanding of racism in the criminal justice system. In these cases, people—usually men of West African origin in a legally precarious situation—were charged with petty drug trading in the park. The park is known among Berlin hipsters and party tourists as a stopover for drug purchases. The Berlin police have defined it as a so-called crime hotspot [kriminalitätsbelasteter Ort] where they can stop and search people without reasonable suspicion. A campaign launched in 2017, Ban Racial Profiling!, in which we participated, challenged this construct. Through our engagement with these ‘Görli cases’, we learned that the migration regime plays an important role in the policing and criminalisation of black people in Berlin Kreuzberg. An interview we did in 2019 with the lawyer Benjamin Düsberg and the work of black activists like Moro Yapha and Mohammed Lamin Jadama addressing working conditions in the park helped us to understand how courts, policing, immigration law, the Euro-African border regime and gentrification relate to reproduce anti-black racism.

Around the same time, in 2018, we started to observe cases in southern Germany, where one of us was researching and active at the time. These were cases of police and security guard violence against black people in the asylum system. They were charged with resisting arrest or violating public order, often after the police suppressed collective protests or strikes. Here we could also see the intersection of the deportation regime and the asylum system with the criminal legal system. We furthermore observed how the police, courts and media influenced public opinion and how politicians amplified this moral panic about ‘black mobs’ or violent black attackers to push for tougher deportation policies.

The experience in Bavaria also taught us the importance of accompanying defendants more closely during their proceedings in order to understand state violence from their perspective. Previously, we had relied on KOP and the lawyers to provide us with this information. By accompanying them, we started to think more about what leads up to the trial: the construction of the case file and the ways in which the police shape the narrative of the court, and how we can more efficiently deconstruct that narrative.

Furthermore, in the years that we were active as a group, we also observed cases of racist violence by white citizens and cases related to the criminalisation of Kurdish activists.

What links do you see between anti-racist struggles and court watching? What contribution can the documentation and publication of court proceedings make?

Our work began with solidarity with victims of racist police violence, who were often accused in theses cases. We saw ourselves as part of a broader movement that challenges the structural violence of the criminal legal system and by other actors against racialised individuals and groups. After 2014, we worked in a context in which many new initiatives on these issues emerged. Among the long-standing groups using court watching were KOP, the Initiative in Remembrance of Oury Jalloh and The VOICE Refugee Forum. Among the newer initiatives were NSU Watch from 2013 and later the Alliance Unraveling the NSU Complex, the Swiss Alliance against Racial Profiling, the Prozessreport group from Vienna, numerous initiatives for the victims of racist police violence in Germany, Justice Collective from 2023 and, most recently, groups monitoring the criminalisation of Palestine solidarity and anti-war protests.

In this dynamic context, we began to consider court watching as an integral part of anti-racist work: as mutual support and empowerment, and as documentation and analysis of racism and repression of our movements. Court watching and documentation can help educate activist communities about both specific cases and the workings of the (racist) criminal legal system. Documenting trials is also important for creating archives of knowledge and resistance for the future. And it is crucial for developing counter-narratives about state violence that deconstruct the state's ‘law and order’ narrative and centre the knowledge of the affected.

When groups are no longer active, important movement knowledge is often lost. There was also a personal overlap between Justice Collective and Justizwatch, which allowed us to incorporate a lot of your experiences. What resources have emerged from your work that courtwatch groups should be aware of?

The most important resource is our blog. In addition to KOP and ReachOut, we also worked closely with the documentation group Culture of Deportation and often published texts together on the blog. Around 2020/2021, only a few trials took place due to the pandemic; at the same time, many members of Justizwatch now had jobs that prevented them from observing trials during office hours. We stopped documenting cases as a group. After that, our former members joined other groups and passed on the knowledge we had gained during the existence of Justizwatch. Some joined the Death in Custody campaign. The campaign researches and documents deaths of racialised people at the hands of the police and in state institutions. In early 2023, Aino joined the Justice Collective and started the court watching project with Mitali. She brought the resources from the work of Justizwatch to this project documenting racism in Berlin courts. Since 2024, some of us have been active in a group that monitors and documents court cases against people who are in solidarity with Palestine or participate in anti-war protests.

You can find a list of further resources here.