Five years ago there was a change of power in North Rhine-Westphalia because the CDU was able to successfully mobilize the issue of internal security in the election campaign.

In their coalition agreement, the CDU and FDP then promised to present situation reports for various crime phenomena.

There is now a new situation report every year on the subject of clan crime.

According to the most recent report, 112 large criminal families are active between the Rhine and Weser.

Justice Minister Peter Biesenbach (CDU) failed to provide any similar concrete information when he presented the first nationwide situation report on parallel justice from a family and criminal law perspective on Thursday.

Pure burger

Political correspondent in North Rhine-Westphalia.

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"Unfortunately, I can't present any numbers and statistics on the various forms." It is in the nature of things that most of the crimes went undetected.

On behalf of the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Justice, three researchers have therefore attempted, through more than 200 interviews with practitioners from the judiciary, the public prosecutor's office, the police and through the evaluation of case files, to at least uncover the dark field of this - as Biesenbach put it - "extremely complex phenomenon". little to illuminate.

Religion does not always play the determining role

"Parallel justice is a frontal attack on the rule of law," said Mathias Rohe, a legal and Islamic scholar who teaches at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Contrary to what is perceived in the media, religion does not always play a decisive role.

Rather, parallel justice is a milieu-specific problem.

Culturally influenced milieus, whose thinking is rooted in the patriarchal extended family with violent education and formal concepts of honor, also applied their own rules in Germany.

As a milieu-specific phenomenon, parallel justice exists to a significant extent in North Rhine-Westphalia.

"It's about far more than just isolated cases."

Like Rohe, Clara Rigoni from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law emphasized that parallel justice thrives in groups with strong expectations of loyalty and high levels of social control.

Relatives, national identity or, as in the case of criminal biker groups or the mafia, common interests in profit are more important than religious aspects.

According to Rigoni, the criminal law focus in connection with parallel justice in NRW is on bodily harm and homicide, property and drug offences, fraud, coercion, threats, kidnapping, human trafficking and forced marriage.

According to the findings of Islamic scholar Rohe, there is “only to a very limited extent” a fixed institutional form of parallel justice, for example through justices of the peace, in the most populous federal state.

On the other hand, it is common for authority figures from certain family groups to resolve conflicts "with direct coercion or strong social pressure".

The victims of parallel justice are the weaker ones - in patriarchal milieus it is mostly women and girls.

Justice Minister Biesenbach announced that North Rhine-Westphalia would intensify both repressive and preventive measures against structures of parallel justice in the short and medium term.

In addition to dropout, victim and witness protection programs, the researchers recommend securing evidence as early as possible.

Because a regularly occurring problem is that witnesses change or withdraw their original statements in the course of criminal proceedings under pressure from their milieu.