A German medical law specialist who launched a rigorous fight against government-mandated coronavirus lockdown rules was taken to a mental health facility after expressing fears she was being targeted by ‘killers.’
Beate Bahner had repeatedly claimed that measures taken by Berlin to stem the spread of Covid-19 threaten nothing less than the nation’s constitutional order itself. The lawyer, from the German city of Heidelberg, was forced to spend a couple of days in a local psychiatric ward after her encounter with police went terribly wrong.
She had already been under police investigation over “calls for an illegal action” after urging Germans to go on a nationwide demonstration against the lockdown last Sunday – in open defiance of the ban on public gatherings.
Bahner called police herself on Sunday when she feared that a car which seemingly blocked her own vehicle in at a parking lot might be driven by “killers” sent to hunt her down. When the officers arrived, she told them she felt persecuted.
What happened next was described by the lawyer as some sort of a nightmarish ordeal.
The police handcuffed her and pushed her to the ground “with brutal force,” Bahner said, in an audio recording attributed to her and which has since been widely circulated online. The officers drove her to a psychiatric ward, where she had to wait for a doctor, who, according to her, “had to first get some instructions from the top or from America.” Bahner said she then had to spend a night in a “Guantanamo-style High Security Ward of Psychiatry,” lying on the floor of her room and without access to a toilet.
The police, however, paint quite a different picture. They said that the woman encountered by the patrol responding to the call “gave a very confused impression,” prompting the cops to take her to a clinic. “She fought back and kicked an officer several times,” a police spokesman told German media, adding that Bahner was eventually admitted to Heidelberg University Hospital.
Both the police and a local public prosecutor’s office repeatedly stated that the incident has nothing to do with the ongoing investigation against Bahner. The lawyer was discharged from the mental health facility after a couple of days.
‘Coronoia’
Bahner is known in Germany as an experienced specialist on medical law, penning several books on related issues. However, as Berlin introduced increasingly restrictive social-distancing rules aimed at stemming the spread of the disease, the lawyer became one of the staunchest lockdown opponents, prompting German media to dub her the “coronoia lawyer.”
Bahner repeatedly claimed that coronavirus is virtually harmless to most people and could only affect about five percent of the population. Furthermore, the German government’s quarantine measures – including closing all non-essential businesses, canceling festivals and sports events, and banning all public gatherings – harm the nation much more than the virus, the lawyer argued.
She slammed the measures as “blatantly unconstitutional” and said they violated Germans’ “fundamental rights” to an “unprecedented extent.” Bahner even filed a lawsuit with the German Constitutional Court last week, demanding it overrule every single order by the German federal and regional governments related to the lockdown, since they “are capable of endangering the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany, its rule of law, democracy and the liberal-democratic basic order in particular.”
The court, however, deemed her application inadmissible on procedural grounds and summarily dismissed it last Friday. Bahner responded by publishing a post on her website declaring all lockdown measures ineffective “immediately” and calling on the public to take to the streets to protest the regulations.
Bahner is now facing a probe over her call for protest action. Her crusade against the lockdown might, meanwhile, become outdated, as Berlin plans to ease some restrictions by early May anyway. To date, Germany has recorded more than 130,000 confirmed cases and over 3,500 Covid-19-related deaths since the start of the outbreak.
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