Legal Complaint Targets Germany’s Role in U.S. Drone Program

NEW YORK—The German government will face a legal challenge later this month over its support for targeted killings carried out by the United States, in relation to a lethal drone strike carried out in Somalia in February 2012.

Cologne’s Administrative Court will hear a complaint on Wednesday April 27 at 10.15 am which argues that allowing U.S. bases on German territory to support such drone strikes violates both the German constitution, as well as Germany’s Status of Forces Agreements (Sofa) with NATO under which US forces are granted the right to operate on its territory.

The administrative complaint, filed on behalf of the son of an innocent Somali herdsman killed in an attack on February 24, 2012, calls for a judicial declaration that Germany has committed these violations.

The drone strike was not directed at the herdsman who died, but at British-born Mohamed Sakr, who was also killed in the attack. The British government had previously stripped Sakr of his British citizenship, asserting he was involved in terrorism-related activity.

The identities of the victim and his son are being kept confidential from the public for reasons of the family’s personal safety.

The legal action was submitted by German lawyers with the support of the Open Society Justice Initiative on September 17, 2015 on behalf of the herdsman’s son. A separate criminal complaint was also filed before the state prosecutor in Zweibrücken, near Ramstein. On December 10, 2015 the federal prosecutor issued a decision stating that he lacked jurisdiction over the case. Accordingly, the prosecutor in Zweibrucken retains jurisdiction and must decide whether or not to open an investigation.

The civil action to be heard later this month asserts that German officials are jointly responsible for the deaths of the two men because Germany hosts two U.S. military facilities involved in planning and operating drone strikes in Africa: the U.S. military’s Africa command headquarters (Africom) in Stuttgart, which is responsible for all military operations in Africa; and the U.S. Air Force base at Ramstein, which plays an indispensable role in conducting U.S. drone operations worldwide, including in Somalia.

No one has yet been held accountable for the murder of the herdsman and there has been no known investigation into his case. The United States has not officially acknowledged killing him. Germany has not officially acknowledged its role in supporting United States drone strikes.

In addition to demonstrating legal violations, both complaints argue that the February 24, 2012 strike did not take place in the context of an armed conflict involving the United States and Germany. The complaint contends that the so-called “global war on terror” is an unsupportable concept under international law, and that hostilities involving the United States and Germany were not of sufficient intensity to qualify them as parties to an armed conflict in Somalia.

The German legal team comprises Natalie von Wistinghausen, Eberhard Kempf and Victor Pfaff. The Open Society Justice Initiative is represented by Amrit Singh.

In May last year, the Administrative Court in Cologne dismissed a complaint over the role of Ramstein in drone strikes filed by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) on behalf of three Yemeni citizens. ECCHR is appealing.

The Open Society Justice Initiative is part of the Open Society Foundations, the largest private funder of human rights work around the world. Its previous litigation on national security-related abuses has included winning judgments from the European Court against Poland and Macedonia for cooperating with secret torture and rendition by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency. In April 2015, the Justice Initiative published Death by Drone: Civilian Harm Caused by U.S. Targeted Killings in Yemen, detailing civilian casualties caused in nine drone attacks carried out between 2012 and 2014.