The Knesset Committee for Diaspora and Immigration demanded on Monday from the German ambassador in Israel, Andrias Michaelis, to inform the Bundestag [the German parliament] that it should pass a law permitting circumcision in the country, in light of the recent court ruling in Cologne forbidding the procedure.
Ambassador Michaelis said, "This is indeed a very crucial issue which has aroused a controversy in Germany. Jewish communities throughout Germany have increased their population by a third in the past two decades and we are determined that the growth continue. The court decided to bar a doctor who performed a defective circumcision on a four-year-old Muslim boy. The defendant was acquitted in the first trial but in the regional court of Cologne it was argued that circumcision did not benefit the child. By German law, a child has the right of physical protection of his body and the court ruled that this right supersedes that of religious freedom since it [circumcision] involves an irreversible procedure."
He said that a federal court cannot intervene in such a sentence but the court ruling in Cologne does not have any binding influence on all other courts.
He added that the German Minister of State stated that religious freedom is safeguarded within the law and that circumcision is anchored in religious tradition; therefore, a judicial ruling cannot introduce any question. "It is necessary to make a legal division between bodily harm and serious physical damage, though I realize that this distinction is not reassuring. There are three parties in the Bundestag which are already promoting legislation to legally secure the right to circumcision, but the initiative will again come to the fore if we see that this ruling continues to raise problems."
