In a personal letter to the more than 600 members of the German Bundestag on Tuesday, Frieder Otto Wolf, President of the Humanist Association of Germany, called on them not to vote in favor of the Federal Government’s draft law to regulate the circumcision of boys who are unable to give their consent (Drs. 17/11295). Wolf appealed to the MPs to decide in favor of a moratorium on the legal regulation and to create a real basis for a consistent solution in terms of children’s rights.
Frieder Otto Wolf reminded the MPs of the binding provisions of the German Basic Law and European and international law, which protect the physical integrity and the right to self-determination of all children, require them to avoid endangering their health and, like the EU Charter, require all public authorities to always make the best interests of the child a primary consideration.
Frieder Otto Wolf therefore warned the members of parliament in his letter that the regulation planned by the federal government would cause serious damage to the law of the Federal Republic of Germany and pointed out its potential to make it more difficult to safeguard the rights of all children in the long term.
The hasty enactment of the law as a reaction to the existing collision of an identity-forming cultural practice with the understanding of human and fundamental rights of large parts of the population was in any case “not to be seen as an appropriate and certainly not as the best solution”.
From the point of view of the humanists in the association, it must be possible for Jewish and Muslim communities to exist and for cultural traditions to be practised in Germany, emphasized Wolf.
He also pointed out that the association had worked at an early stage to ensure that the controversy did not become a springboard for anti-Semitism or racism in Germany and called for such tendencies to be opposed everywhere.
In his letter, Wolf also warned against a hardening of the fronts in society due to immature solutions and expressed his fear that the adoption of the law planned by the federal government could give new impetus to existing anti-Semitic attitudes.
Finally, Frieder Otto Wolf called on the members of the German Bundestag “not to vote in favor of the federal government’s draft and to give our country the culturally significant opportunity to overcome the open contradiction between a religiously traditional interfering practice and the contemporary view of humanity and our modern understanding of human rights without rashly resorting to new laws.”
