To Lower Saxony and Bavaria
OVG in Saarland overturns the 2G rule
01/21/2022, 5:27 p.m
First the Lower Saxony Higher Administrative Court overturned the 2G regulation in retail for the state, then the Bavarian Administrative Court also for the Free State. Now, even in Saarland, people who have neither recovered nor been vaccinated can no longer be excluded from retail.
The Saarland Higher Administrative Court (OVG) has temporarily suspended the access restriction to retail stores under the 2G regulation. The OVG in Saarlouis announced that this would grant an urgent application from several Saarland specialist markets for electronic items. The decision means that in Saarland the 2G regulation will generally no longer apply in retail until further notice. The federal and state governments had agreed nationwide on the 2G rules for retail at the beginning of December.
In the opinion of the Higher Administrative Court of Saarland, “the regulation violates the principle of the rule of law derived from the requirement of certainty of norms”. The only exceptions to the rule are shops whose range of goods or services serves to cover daily needs. However, exceptions also apply to other shops.
For Lower Saxony, the Higher Administrative Court in Lüneburg overturned the rules in mid-December. The Bavarian Administrative Court suspended the 2G rule for retail in Bavaria this week. In Baden-Württemberg, too, the administrative court (VGH) of the state in Mannheim had suspended the 2G regulation for universities and explained in the justification that freezing the rules uncoupled from the hospitalization rate was not in line with the legal requirements.
However, it is unclear according to which criteria the retail businesses would be covered by the exemption. Because neither the catalog of exceptions nor the official justification result in uniform, objectifiable criteria for the extended scope of the regulation. The decision is final.