Taxi drivers jailed for carrying foreigners
GERMANY — It sounds like a bitter joke on the racist German juridical system, but it actually happened. Two taxi-drivers have been sentenced to 16 month's and 22 months' jail for transporting foreigners from a town near the Polish border to another one 25 miles [40 km] west without informing the border patrol about their "suspicious" passengers
As the liberal German daily Frankfurter Rundschau reported on August 15, the District Court in Zittau, a small town on the German-Polish border, last spring found the two men guilty of "supporting illegal immigration". Both cab drivers appealed to the court.
The foreigners were later arrested for not having a permit to stay in Germany. According to the judges' decision, the cab drivers should have become suspicious about their passengers travelling without luggage.
Moreover, said the court, in the district of Loebau-Zittau it was "highly unlikely" for anyone to meet non-Germans who could afford a taxi ride (the 1000 foreigners living in the district are, as a witness for the prosecution pointed out, 600 asylum seekers and nearly 400 students). In the judges' opinion, therefore, it is most unusual for any foreigner to take a taxi instead of walking the 25 miles, "following the railway tracks".
The sentence was especially severe because the court suspects that the taxi drivers are involved in organised crime — after all they had "realised that their passengers were foreigners", in the judges' odd explanation.
In response to the taxi-drivers' defence that they had no right to demand immigration papers, the court stated that they had "had the possibility of calling the border patrol".
The Zittau taxi companies protested against the judgment. Cab drivers would now in general have to refuse the transport of any foreigner if they did not want to act unlawfully.
Accordingly, they applied to the district magistrate's office to do so legally or else to be given the authority to control people's identity papers. In reply, the office stated it could not give such permission but recommended treating similar situations with "a certain caution".
It furthermore promised "leniency" if any "legitimate passenger" reported to the police that transport had been refused.
[Reprinted from the internet at http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/4939.]