SPD Interior Minister Nancy Faeser proudly presented the study a few months ago – now it is being scrapped. Her department no longer wants to distribute the controversial report by the “Independent Expert Group on Muslim Hostility” (UEM).
The move is not voluntary: the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) is reacting to a court ruling. In a letter to the Berlin Administrative Court, the BMI states that the UEM report will remain offline and any remaining printed copies will be disposed of – as reported by German broadcaster RBB.
There had been a dispute over the report for months: Publicist Henryk M. Broder and Islamism expert Sigrid Herrmann had successfully filed a lawsuit against its mention in the report. They felt that their reputation had been damaged by negative mentions as “critics of Islam”.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior financed the report with a total of 1.5 million euros. The group of experts was appointed by the then Interior Minister Seehofer after the racially motivated attack in Hanau (10 people died) in 2020 and has since been disbanded.
The fact that the BMI is now cancelling the final report on “Muslim hostility” following a court order is “a resounding defeat for the Federal Minister of the Interior on all counts”, CDU interior politician Christoph de Vries told NIUS. The CDU/CSU politician also featured in the report and was accused of lacking distance towards the AfD. “The CDU/CSU (de Vries) opposed hostility towards Muslims, but (like the AfD) rejected the term ‘anti-Muslim racism’ as an allegedly contrived term,” it said about the member of the Bundestag – as it was seen as a disparagement of his work.
De Vries told NIUS that little remained of the original intention of highlighting hostility towards Muslims in everyday life and counteracting this form of misanthropy: “Instead, it was misused to defame and silence critics of Islamism such as Henryk M. Broder and Siegried Herrmann-Marschall, as well as my parliamentary group, using questionable methods and questionable actors.” De Vries calls on the Federal Minister of the Interior to apologise to those affected.
However, the BMI apparently does not want to explicitly distance itself from the content of the statements about Herrmann and Broder. In response to an enquiry, the ministry merely stated that it had always made it clear “that this is not a report by the BMI, but a report by an independent group of experts that has merely been published by the BMI.” From now on, the report will no longer be published in such a way that it “can be categorised as an official statement by the BMI”.
The BMI continued: “Whether and how the Independent Expert Group on Muslim Enmity (UEM) will publish its report in future is up to the expert panel itself.”
Professor Mathias Rohe from the University of Erlangen, who coordinated the expert panel at the time, did not want to comment on the events to RBB. As the committee no longer exists, it is not authorised to say anything about it.
Whether the controversial report will ever be published again is questionable. At least one former member of the panel of experts is said to refuse to have it published online again on his own initiative.