BM63 – ESU calls for legal institution of publicly constituted student bodies in Bavaria
Resolution:
ESU calls for legal institution of publicly constituted student bodies in Bavaria
In the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the main responsibility for education policies lies with the sixteen federal states. To ensure the students’ right to political participation based on independent processes of decision making, fifteen out of sixteen of the federal states legally institute comprehensive student bodies at their higher education institution (HEI), consisting of all the students at the respective HEI. Doing so, they grant these student bodies certain rights like self-governance (including decision-making about their statutes), self-financing (including the right to raise membership fees) and a political mandate to represent their members.
After the south-western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg recently changed it’s higher education laws accordingly, introducing a quite progressive kind of legally constituted bodies which is granting the students a comparatively high autonomy, the south-eastern state of Bavaria is being rendered the only remaining state within the FRG still withholding these basic rights of self-determination from their students. In fact, in Bavaria there do not exist any actual student bodies in self-governance, although they have students present in the universities academic bodies.
Therefore, the European Students Union (ESU) calls for the government of Bavaria to legally institute publicly constituted student bodies, as they exist throughout the other fifteen federal states of Germany. They need to be defined by law as enjoying certain rights like self-governance (including decision-making about their statutes), self-financing (including the right to raise membership fees) and a political mandate to represent their members – including the right to act as a legal entity e.g. in contracts or courts, as suitable for a public corporation.
Moreover, ESU encourages the German Bundestag to envision the legal foundation of this kind of student bodies throughout the whole FRG by a respective federal law changing the German basic law, as being demanded by the federal umbrella organisation of student bodies, freier zusammenschluss von studentInnenschaften, since their existence.
