Former President of the Federal Constitutional Court, Hans-Jürgen Papier, is calling for a revised approach to the selection of judges for the court in Karlsruhe.
In comments published Tuesday, Papier asserted that the issue doesn’t lie with the legal framework of the selection process, but rather with decades-old practices adopted by political parties. He stated that without any legal basis, the major parties – historically the CDU/CSU and SPD – unilaterally assigned themselves “rights of proposal” later shared with smaller coalition partners like the FDP and Greens.
Papier argued this rigid distribution of established proposal rights is unsustainable. “It does not reflect the current composition of Parliament and ignores the changes and fragmentation that have occurred in the German party landscape” he said. Maintaining the current system, he contends, risks turning the selection of constitutional judges into a partisan squabble, which would inevitably harm the reputation and authority of the Federal Constitutional Court.
He emphasized that positions on the Federal Constitutional Court should not be treated as hereditary, urging parties to relinquish these established “rights of proposal”. Papier proposed that the twelve members of the Bundestag’s selection committee, chosen according to principles of proportional representation, instead engage in confidential and fact-based discussions to agree on candidates, which would then be presented to the full Bundestag for a vote. This approach, he suggests, would avoid the perception of candidates being pre-determined by party quotas.
Papier further highlighted that, according to existing regulations, any member of the selection committee can propose a candidate, provided they secure at least eight of the twelve votes. He believes that maintaining confidentiality within the committee’s deliberations could facilitate objective discussions and prevent the public discrediting of candidates.
