Wednesday, August 19, 2015

The German Seizure Story

I noticed this interesting story that came up this morning over refugees in Germany.

Tubingen is this town down in Baden-Wurttemberg (southern-half of Germany).....with a population of roughly ninety-thousand residents.  The chief business around this city is mostly related to the university.  It's a shock when you note that the university has almost ten thousand employees and almost twenty-eight thousand students.  When you want to talk politics about the town....it's a youth-driven agenda or a university-driven agenda.

Well....the mayor (a Green Party member) has come upon this problem of housing the refugees coming into Tubingen.

There is a little-known law in Germany that allows mayors, under certain conditions, to temporarily seize homes in a local area.  As much as I've figured out.....it relates to public safety but there's not a lot of discussion by German legal folks over the application in this sense.

The mayor says if necessary.....he'll seize empty houses within Tubingen and utilize them for several months to handle the incoming refugees to his city.

Naturally, this type of talk has triggered some opposition comments over the legality of using state laws to temporarily confiscate private property.  After the utilization (say six months of refugee use), then there's the question of damages and how the state pays the private owner for this.

My humble guess is that legal efforts would occur and draw this into a two-year German court battle.  The use of the law in this case?  It might be employed on one occasion and then get dragged out long enough to make it more of a comedy act than a legal standing.

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