BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s Constitutional Court on Tuesday ruled in favour of an injunction brought by a conservative lawmaker against the government’s planned heating bill, saying consultation time for the law was too short.
Christian Democratic Union (CDU) lawmaker Thomas Heilmann, Berlin’s former justice senator and a Bundestag member, last week applied for an injunction against an economy ministry bill that aims to phase out oil and gas heating systems in Europe’s biggest economy in a step to help the country become climate-neutral by 2045.
Heilmann said time for deliberations over the planned bill, which the government wants to get through parliament before the summer break, was too short.
“Hundreds of pages of amendment texts that may be e-mailed on Friday evening, discussed in committee on Wednesday and finally discussed in plenary on Thursday no longer have anything to do with parliamentary democracy,” Heilmann said in a statement on Thursday.
The court said Heilmann’s rights as a member of parliament to equal participation in parliamentary decision-making were violated through the shortened deliberation time.
(Reporting by Riham Alkousaa, Ursula Knapp and Christoph Steitz; Editing by Sandra Maler)
