Mr. Rixen, you head the Institute for Constitutional Law at the University of Cologne and have been a member of the Independent Commission for the Reappraisal of Child Sexual Abuse since the beginning of this month. What does one have to do with the other?
Daniel Deckers
in the political editorial department responsible for "Die Gegenwart".
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The topic of violence in our society has occupied me since my student days. Since 2010, I have been dealing with this topic, for example within the framework of the German Association for Public and Private Welfare, the umbrella organization of actors in social policy, but also in research projects, especially with the financing of women's shelters and counseling centers for victims of violence.
For a constitutional lawyer, this commitment is relatively unusual.
As a constitutional lawyer, you would do well to deal with specific areas of law. In my case, it is social and health law, especially since numerous constitutional questions can be explored on it. Unfortunately, for many in the legal profession, social law is rather a marginal area, although it depends on its own state goal, namely the principle of the welfare state.
How do you explain the low reputation of social law?
For a long time, the constitutional debate focused on defending against state interference with freedom. For a long time, she was not interested in enabling freedom through state services. Especially child and youth welfare law, which is part of social law, reminds us very vividly that it is one of the state's tasks to constantly improve protection against sexual violence, especially through preventive measures.
In 2019, you advised the German Bishops' Conference on the question of what a new model of payments for recognition services could look like. Why did the bishops not follow the advice of your working group?
We had proposed that, in future, we should not only orient ourselves towards the conventional sums of the law on compensation for pain and suffering, but also to focus more strongly on the violation of personal rights - knowing full well that this will be constructed differently from a legal point of view. We wanted to compare the ratings. Then the payments would have had to be significantly higher in recognition of the suffering suffered. Unfortunately, the bishops did not want that.
Despite this experience, you were proposed by the North Rhine-Westphalian state government as a member of the Independent Reappraisal Commission of the Archdiocese of Cologne and were elected its chairman in June 2022. You left the Commission in December. What had happened in the meantime?
My impression was that the State Chancellery in Düsseldorf did not find it easy to find people who wanted to work on such a commission. There were enough reservations about such a body, as in the Joint Declaration of the Catholic dioceses and the then Independent Commissioner of the Federal Government for Questions of Child Sexual Abuse (UBSKM) from spring 2020. How can the independence and operational capacity of the commissions be guaranteed? What are the powers with regard to retroactive processing or control of prevention work? All this was not clarified and was ultimately passed on to the commissions on the ground.