• Germany: Trial for Love Parade tragedy ends without sentence

The accumulation of nonsense they have suffered would give for a film, and in fact, the way of the cross of the families whose children lost their lives at the Love Parade in Duisburg (Germany) in 2010 has been collected in a documentary whose shooting has just finished after two and a half years, unfortunately without the ending that everyone would have liked.

The next July 24 marks the tenth anniversary of the tragedy that left 21 dead (including two young Spaniards) and more than 600 wounded. Sad anniversary since, according to German law, they are going to prescribe possible criminal responsibilities in the absence of a sentence. It will be so inexorably before the impossibility of reaching a verdict in just a month and a half. With the argument of keeping the wheels of Justice slowed down by the coronavirus crisis, the Duisburg Court has already decided to shelve the matter, despite acknowledging up to 34 errors in the assembly and multiple culprits.

The decision, against which there is no recourse, is final. However, the families of the deceased Clara Zapater and Blanca Acosta - two 22-year-old Erasmus students from Tarragona and Cambrils - do not give up. "We have violated the right to a fair trial and we are protected by Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Is an unfinished trial without sentence equitable? In our opinion, no, so we will go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, ”says lawyer Paco Zapater , Clara's father and spokesman. "It is a matter of dignity and a moral duty to denounce the German State, although we will have to settle for a symbolic sentence because Strasbourg lacks the powers to re-judge a prescribed crime," he adds.

The German judicial authorities - with the accession of the prosecutor and the defenses and the opposition of the private accusations - have falsely closed a macro-trial that began reluctantly at the end of 2017 and that should have ended in December 2018. The indolence regarding the case and the fear that he could prescribe goes back a long way. Zapater already expressed it two and a half years ago: "If on July 24, 2020, no sentence has been passed, the trial will automatically be prescribed and all the effort will have been in vain." Said and done. “It is the chronicle of an announced death that we have been warning about for a long time, but we were ignored; instead of speeding up the trial, they continued to idle, with 184 sessions in 127 weeks, an average day and a half of work per week, ”the lawyer denounces.

Laziness has characterized the entire judicial process since the months after the accident. "From the beginning there has been resistance to advance," laments Zapater. The fact of arriving at the opening of the trial was quite an odyssey, he explains, "with the disappointment of not seeing Adolf Sauerland , mayor of Duisburg when the tragedy occurred, sitting on the bench , Roy Schaller , owner of the company who organized the festival, and the chief of police responsible for security. " According to various testimonies, nearly a million and a half people had been concentrated in the Duisburg compound, three times the capacity allowed. "It was a mousetrap," Clara's father has reported on numerous occasions.

In April 2016, the case was shelved by the Duisburg Court after taking testimony from more than 3,400 witnesses and reviewing over a thousand hours of footage from surveillance cameras or mobile phones of assistants. However, the Prosecutor's Office and the private prosecution -60 affected, represented by 35 lawyers- filed an appeal before the Düsseldorf High Court - together with more than 362,000 support signatures collected throughout Europe-, which in early 2017 ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered to reopen the trial.

As the tenth anniversary of the tragedy is about to be completed, when families look back they are left with the bitter residue of having suffered «a deliberate will not to enter into the background of responsibilities; the method has been to act with exasperating slowness so that the possible crimes would prescribe without sentence, as it has been ”. "What hurts us the most," Zapater summarizes, "is that, according to the court, the death of 21 people and the injuries of another 600 are not considered a matter of general interest."

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