by Jon Shelton
14 Mar 2019; DW: An appeal has begun in the case of three Yemenis suing the German government for complicity in the death of family members killed in US drone strikes. Ramstein Air Base in Germany is integral to the US drone program.
In his opening statement Thursday, the presiding judge, Wolf Sarnighausen, said that the Higher Administrative Court in Münster was faced with a daunting and massive task. One that neither the German Constitutional Court nor the Federal Administrative Court had yet tackled.
The case of bin Ali Jaber vs. Germany, which opened today, seeks to force the German government to admit shared responsibility in the killing of two of the plaintiffs' family members in Yemen in 2012. Furthermore, the plaintiffs are calling on Germany to prohibit the United States from using its Ramstein Air Base in its global drone war.
Judge Sarnighausen said that his court would be tasked with determining Germany's role in specific human rights and constitutional issues.
German Defense Department denies responsibility
The German government has denied all responsibility for the deaths of civilians such as members of the bin Ali Jaber family. The German Defense Department, which is representing the government, says that it has no evidence that Ramstein is involved in the US drone war, and claims that drone attacks are neither launched nor flown from Germany. Although that is technically true, it is not the whole story.
Germany's pivotal role in the US drone war
The United States currently operates unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones, in a number of countries, namely: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
All of the drones used in those theaters are remotely operated from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, USA. Drones flying missions against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) are launched from Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, Africa.
Yet none of those missions would be possible without Germany's help — for the heart of the program lies in Rhineland-Pfalz. Ground satellites at Ramstein Air Base link operators in the US with space-based satellites and then to the drones.
US Africa Command (AFRICOM), which controls operations on the continent, is also based in Germany.
Fighting for justice
The bin Ali Jaber family, represented in Münster by the human rights groups Reprieve and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), brought their case to the Higher Administrative Court on appeal after having lost their initial trial case before the Cologne Administrative Court in 2015.
The Cologne court ruled that the German government was not obliged to prohibit the US from using Ramstein for its drone war.
Death from the skies
US MQ-9 Reaper drones flying over Yemen are typically armed with 500 pound (227 kilo) Hellfire missiles and/or 510 pound GBU-12 Paveway II bombs. Although the US Department of Defense does not publish statistics on drone casualties, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), a London-based non-profit news organization, has regularly tabulated the human cost of the program in the country.
TBIJ says that the US has carried out at least 329 confirmed strikes in Yemen. The total number of individuals killed in those strikes according to TBIJ is between 1,020 and 1,384. Between 174 and 225 of those killed were civilians and between 44 and 50 were children.
US drones stir controversy in Germany 12h ago
Command, click, kill? Weaponized drones are highly controversial in Germany. Two cases involving fatal drone attacks carried out by the United States are being brought before Germany's Higher Administrative Court in Münster.
Three Yemenis have taken legal action against the German government, as has one Somali. The plaintiffs claim to have relatives who lost their lives as a direct result of the deployment of US drones in their home countries.
The attacks are said to have been carried out via the Ramstein US military base in the state of Rhineland-Palentine, which is why the injured parties are suing the German government for being partially responsible. The military site is shrouded in secrecy. Little information is made public about what goes on at the facility, which is extremely controversial in Germany. More than 54,000 American citizens live in the community around Ramstein Air Base, including military personnel, their relatives and retirees, making it the largest American military presence outside the US.
Forwarding signals to deadly drones
Ramstein is mainly used as a hub for US military transportation. But apart from those carrying out activities at and through the air base, there is little public information available about what else takes place there. Even the few details about the suspected coordination of drone missions from the base took some time to surface.
In 2016, Germany's deputy minister for Europe, Michael Roth, reported in the German parliament that the US had informed the Foreign Ministry the base would be used as a telecommunications relay station for data traffic with unmanned aircraft. This means that radio signals are automatically received and forwarded on.
According to Marcel Dickow, a security policy expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, they "presumably come from the US via glass fiber," and are then passed on to the drones via satellite, but he added that "other operational functions are unknown."
From the US, the distance to directly control drone missions in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Yemen is too far. This is why the US depends on the Ramstein base to forward data from the US on to its intended destination. In addition, US military personnel plan and supervise air operations in Ramstein and also follow up with evaluations, Roth reported.
'No knowledge'
Until Roth gave his report, the government always insisted that it had "no knowledge" of US operations that take place at Ramstein. Both Roth and later government spokespersons repeatedly emphasized that unmanned aircraft neither took off nor were controlled from Ramstein. When DW contacted the Foreign Ministry, this again was the official information provided. In addition, government spokespersons have repeatedly referred in recent years to the assurance from the US that the activities in its military properties in Germany "will be carried out in accordance with applicable law."
The Foreign Ministry reiterated this: "We are in regular exchange with our US partners on political, military and legal issues of the US armed forces in Germany. This includes an understanding that the US abides by German law both in its activities at Ramstein as well as in the whole of Germany." This adherence is also laid out in Article 2 of the NATO Status of Forces Agreement.
A danger to trans-Atlantic relations
For Dickow, however, it is clear that the German government clearly does not want to know everything that is going on at Ramstein. "Trans-Atlantic relations should not be worsened," he said. "The fight against terrorism has always been a contentious issue. This is due to the fact that Germany cannot and will not support aspects of the US anti-terrorism campaign."
Dickow says this willing blind-eye is evidenced by the way the German government overlooks opportunities to shine light on US activities within its borders, such as the German parliamentary investigation into the NSA spying scandal. Another opportunity ultimately passed up came along in 2015, when the Yemenis and the Somalis currently suing in Münster made their first legal attempt to hold to the German government jointly responsible for the death of their relatives. At that time, the Cologne Administrative Court ruled in the first case that the government was not obliged to prohibit the US from using Ramstein for drone attacks in Yemen.
Even in 2015, representatives from the German Ministry of Defense stated that they had no knowledge of whether the US military base was being used for drone attacks.
Germany aiding violations of international law?
For human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, however, it is clear that with the available knowledge on the coordination of drone attacks from Germany, the government is assisting the actions of the US.
In a statement released by the organization in 2018, it said that the situation is "even more acute given recent reports that President [Donald] Trump has rolled back restrictions governing the US's use of armed drones and lethal force abroad and dramatically expanded the administration's lethal drone operations."
Amnesty published an analysis of the roles and involvement of European states in US drone missions. According to the report, the German government is not doing enough to ensure that it does not aid drone attacks that violate international law.
Will the cases being brought in Münster bring new insights? That is something that even security expert Dickow is unable to predict: "Politically, I don't see that anything in the attitude of the [German] government has shifted in recent years."
According to the presiding judge in Münster, the court is facing a daunting and massive task. He said that neither the Constitutional Court, Germany's highest court, nor the Federal Administrative Court had ever dealt with a case of "comparable constellation."
