Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania: Court: Corona protection fund violated the rights of members of parliament

Greifswald (dpa / mv) - The AfD parliamentary group was partially right with its lawsuit in connection with the state's corona protection fund.

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania: Court: Corona protection fund violated the rights of members of parliament

Greifswald (dpa / mv) - The AfD parliamentary group was partially right with its lawsuit in connection with the state's corona protection fund. The legal regulations for the second supplementary budget from December 2020 violated the rights of the members of the state parliament in certain points, said Monika Köster-Flachsmeyer, President of the State Constitutional Court, in Greifswald on Thursday. In essence, the issue is that the government made decisions on its own and the parliamentarians were not sufficiently involved.

As part of the supplementary budget, the MV protection fund was increased from 700 million to 2.85 billion euros. The court is of the opinion that the validity of the credit authorization beyond the period of the approved budget infringes the rights of the members of parliament. With regard to the fund, their right is limited to regular consultation and voting.

The economic plan for the exact use of the funds should not only have been decided by the budget committee, but also by the state parliament. However, this infringement of the law has now been remedied by a subsequent change.

Objections, however, were unsuccessful, for example that the debt brake had been violated or that budgetary principles such as transparency had been violated. Köster-Flachsmeyer made it clear that due to the nature of the lawsuit, only violations of the rights of members of parliament could have been checked. The now unsuccessful objections were not aimed at such things.

The AfD lacked the necessary 30 percent in the Schwerin state parliament for a norm control procedure that could have dealt directly with the protection fund.