On 11 February 2020, the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ) submitted a draft of a second law amending the Youth Protection Act (JuSchG). Dr. Stephan Dreyer and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulz the current hearing of associations as an opportunity to comment on the draft.
Dreyer and Schulz write that the draft contains some good and important approaches, such as the explicit mention of personal integrity as a protection goal in the protection of minors from harmful media, the possibility of automated evaluation procedures, the strengthening of infrastructure-based protection instruments and approaches of Safety by Design. However, both formal and substantive legal problems are emerging. On the one hand, the Federal Government's initiative raises the smouldering competence problem in the protection of minors in the media. “Who has legislative competence? The Federal Government, because this is public welfare, or the Länder as a more specific competence annexed to the legislative competence for mass media, which is part of the cultural sovereignty of the Länder? In this respect, some hard fronts have arisen in the jurisprudential discussion, which the JuSchG draft decides in its favour without much consideration.” The problems of substantive law relate above all to the adherence to the release decisions to be made in principle by the highest state authorities, as well as to the new supervisory competences of the BPjM, “Here the state's remote control is clearly challenged by the media-related decision-making rights of direct state authorities.”
Download the compolete statement here
Deyer, S.; Schulz, W. (2020): Schriftliche Stellungnahme zu dem Entwurf eines Zweiten Gesetzes zur Änderung des Jugendschutzgesetzes [Written Statement on the Draft of a Second Act Amending the Youth Protection Act]. Hamburg, 28 Februar 2020.
