BERILN, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has ruled on Wednesday that a controversial national census held in 2011 was compatible with the country's constitutional law (Grundgesetz).
The Karlsruhe-based judges hereby rejected closely-watched legal complaints filed by Berlin and Hamburg in which the two city states criticized the new micro-census methodology used in the population-counting exercise. The first census to be held since German re-unification revealed that the country has around 1.5 million inhabitants less than previously assumed, a finding which carried far-reaching fiscal implications for some regional and municipal governments.
Under the so-called "financial compensation" (Finanzausgleich) system in Germany, the country's 16 federal states and municipal governments are all allocated a share of the annual federal government which also corresponds with their population size among other indicators.
Large cities such as Berlin in Hamburg in particular have hence lost out on millions of euros in federal funds each year since the 2011 census in which their official populations shrunk. In total, around 340 cities and municipalities subsequently filed lawsuits in a bid to overturn the census.
Such hopes are now unlikely to be fulfilled given the latest verdict by the Federal Constitutional Court on the matter. The judges concluded that the micro-census practice to rely on surveys of only around 10 percent of the population and supplement this information with official data on residents from a range of government agencies is legally sound.
Presiding judge Andreas Vosskuhle said that a high quality of procedures to determine the number of German inhabitants was mandated by the constitution due to its "high political and financial importance" but saw no breach of the principle in the use of the micro-census methodology. Vosskuhle noted that other countries relied on this practice as well due to its lower costs and argued that it was actually "more considerate to the constitution" than the alternative because it required citizens to provide less personal data to authorities.
