Hamburg’s red-green Senate wants to remove the term “race” from state law. So far, this prohibits discrimination based on “race” or “racial persecution” in several places, the Senate announced on Tuesday. But since there are no different human races, the terms should now be replaced by the word “racist” – “as a distancing from theories that claim the existence of different human races”. According to the information, the background to the draft law is a corresponding request from the citizenry in November 2020.
“Science says that people cannot be divided into races,” said Justice Senator Anna Gallina (Greens). Only racist ideologies made this assumption. “The term has no place in legal texts.” The division into races also contradicts the spirit and human image of the Basic Law. “The change is therefore an important linguistic correction and now names the problem clearly and unequivocally: no one should be racially discriminated against. There are no human races.”
The judicial policy spokeswoman for the Greens parliamentary group, Lena Zagst, spoke of a clear signal against racial discrimination. “I am very pleased that we are now bringing our laws to the current state of science, also in terms of language, because it has been clearly proven that there are no human races.”
A year ago, efforts were also made in the German Bundestag to make similar changes. Corresponding draft laws from the Greens and the Left were available, but were not voted on during the legislative period, and the Union parties also opposed the project. In an expert hearing at the time, Prof. Mehrdad Payandeh from the Hamburg University of Law also made a statement. He considered the proposals to be constitutionally convincing, as they addressed a socially important problem and sent an important signal in dealing with racial discrimination and the consequences of such discrimination. “They strengthened the constitutional framework for dealing with discrimination and fit into the existing structure of constitutional, international and Union law,” says the expert.
