Munich (dpa / lby) - The Bavarian Constitutional Court has dismissed a lawsuit against the new compulsory elective subject Islamic teaching in the Free State. The popular action is inadmissible, according to the court's decision, which was made public on Tuesday. The educator Ernst-Günther Krause, the Bavarian Association for Freedom of Thought and the Munich regional group in the support group of the Giordano Bruno Foundation had complained about the new subject.
According to the court, all legal provisions of Bavarian state law could be attacked with popular action. However, this does not include the curricula for Islamic instruction - these are merely internal administrative regulations "which serve the internal structure of the instruction and which do not have the character of legal regulations with external effects". And the applicants also "did not complain in a permissible manner" that the legal regulation on Islamic instruction would unconstitutionally restrict a basic right of the Bavarian constitution.
The court's decision also states that, contrary to the plaintiffs' assumption, Islamic instruction is "not denominational religious instruction" - that can be "clearly and unambiguously inferred" from the law itself and its justification.
A year ago, the state parliament approved the conversion of the previous state-wide pilot project into a regular compulsory elective subject, Islamic instruction. It can be chosen at several hundred schools for pupils, especially those of Muslim faith, instead of religious studies and alongside ethics. It is explicitly a state offer in which state teachers are supposed to impart knowledge about the Islamic religion and a basic value orientation "in the spirit of the value system of the Basic Law and the Bavarian Constitution" in German.
