In Germany, a high-profile trial has drawn the attention of the media and reignited debates around the political nature of the country’s judiciary. On May 31, the Higher Regional Court of Dresden sentenced Lina E., a left-wing activist, to five years and three months in prison for attacks on high-profile neo-Nazis. Public debate surrounding the case was quick to paint her as the alleged figurehead of a nascent “left-wing extremism.” What has been dubbed the Antifa-East trial constitutes one of the most significant cases targeting someone associated with a left-wing political organization since the Red Army Faction, the West German militant urban guerrilla network that carried out bombings, assassinations, and bank robberies from the 1970s to the early 90s.

The prosecution has accused Lina E. and her three codefendants of having organized and carried out at least six assaults against prominent neo-Nazis in the period from 2018 to 2020, injuring thirteen people. However, the prosecution did not just allege that Lina E. and her associates had caused bodily harm, but that they were involved in the “foundation of a criminal organization.” Most of the reporting focused on Lina E., the alleged ringleader, a twenty-eight-year-old student of social pedagogy with no previous convictions. Brought to the general federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe by helicopter, surrounded by masked police officers, Lina E. became an effective symbol of a movement whose existence is dubious. The conservative politicians have used the public obsession with Lina E. — whom the right-wing tabloid Bild called “Germany’s most dangerous far-left extremist” — to motivate a relentless campaign of fearmongering about “left-wing terrorism.”

The German state based its charges primarily on Paragraph 129 of the German Criminal Code, a highly contentious section dealing with the formation of criminal associations. According to Paragraph 129, anyone who founds or attempts to establish an association aimed at committing offenses can receive a prison sentence of up to five years. Law enforcement initially used this law to criminalize communist organizations in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s. Since then, however, Paragraph 129 has remained an important juridical mechanism for justifying almost unlimited investigative authority. Since lawmakers reformed the law in 2017, prosecutors no longer need to provide detailed proof of an organizational structure in order to charge defendants. This does not just allow but necessitates the use of circumstantial evidence by the jury to support the existence of a coherent criminal organization.