Headnotes (non-official):

1. The guarantee of effective legal recourse requires that courts deciding in rehabilitation proceedings follow up on every promising lead to establish the facts of the case.
   
   
2. Judicial decisions that disregard clearly applicable rules or that misinterpret a rule’s content in a blatant manner violate the prohibition of arbitrary decisions enshrined in Article 3.1 of the Basic Law.

Summary:

I.

The Federal Constitutional Court had to decide on a constitutional complaint of a complainant who had unsuccessfully sought rehabilitation for having been placed in children’s homes in the former German Democratic Republic in the 1960s and 1970s.

II.

The Federal Constitutional Court ruled that in order to satisfy the requirements of effective legal recourse as provided for by Article 2.1 in conjunction with Article 20.3 of the Basic Law, courts that decide in rehabilitation proceedings must follow up on every promising lead and must employ every permissible means of obtaining evidence to establish the facts of the case. This requirement is also laid down by the first sentence of § 10.1 of the Criminal Law Rehabilitation Act (hereinafter: the “Act”), which imposes an ex officio duty on the court to establish the facts of the case, because the court has a particular duty of care towards the applicant.

These standards were not met in the case at hand, as the court did not follow up on leads that suggested political reasons for the complainant’s admission into the children’s homes.

The Federal Constitutional Court also held that the prohibition on arbitrary decisions enshrined in Article 3.1 of the Basic Law bars courts from making decisions that appear completely unreasonable and that suggest that the court was led by illegitimate considerations. However, this does not mean that every false interpretation of the law constitutes a violation. Only such decisions that disregard clearly applicable rules or that misinterpret a rule’s content in a blatant manner contravene Article 3.1 of the Basic Law.

In the case at hand, the court violated this prohibition by refusing to apply § 7.2 of the Act, which was clearly applicable to the case, and by denying that the conditions under which the complainant was forced to live in the children’s homes amounted to imprisonment, even though the restrictions imposed on him were most severe – hereby blatantly disregarding the legislative intention of § 2 of the Act.