According to a report, the investigative authorities and criminal courts in Germany are still heavily overloaded. As the “Bild am Sonntag” (like Welt belongs to Axel Springer), citing an evaluation of the judges’ association, the public prosecutors reached around 5.5 million new cases in 2024 in a row in 2024. This is about 515,000 procedures more than in 2020.
At the end of 2024, according to the report, the prosecutors were piled by 950,000 unanswered cases – around 240,000 more than in 2020. At the same time, the public prosecutors hired more and more procedures, writes the “BAMS”. Only every 16th case led to an indictment in court in 2024, while in 2014 it was still tenth.
As a consequence, the German Richterbund (DRB) is calling for a massive investment package from the federal and state governments for the judiciary. “The problems of the chronically overloaded investigative authorities and criminal courts no longer tolerate a delay,” said DRB federal manager Sven Rebehn the “Bild am Sonntag”.
In particular, he sees the federal states in the debt. The Federal Government finally wanted to “take almost half a billion euros in hand to strengthen public prosecutors and accelerate legal proceedings,” said Rebehn. The federal states would have to “promise a personnel offensive this autumn so that the co-financing of the federal government can flow and quickly arrive in the judiciary”.
