Peter wrote:
In the UK, this German case could never, under any stretch of imagination, ever, have been prosecuted. Even a semi illiterate defence solicitor who spends 99% of his time dealing with property boundary disputes, would have wiped the floor with the prosecution.So how is this possible to get this far in Germany? What is the essential mechanism in action?
I’d be interested in seeing the exact court documents indeed. It may be just the randomness of court decisions (bad decisions do happen), or it may be the different standards of the administrative courts. In France (and I get the impression, also in Germany, since the link talks about “Münich Finance Court”), cases against the state are taken up in wholly different courts, with different procedures, rules, standards for proof, etc. I hear that in France, a lawyer that is only used to civil courts and criminal courts will be used by the representative of the state to wipe the floor, so much the process is different, and so much there are strict deadlines, and standards of proof. For tax cases, there is stuff like “no, that signed contract you show has not been stamped by the state (with payment of the afferent stamp tax…), so we are going to assume it is backdated and the date on it is not admissible evidence, and thus we are going to tax you as if that contract didn’t exist at the time you had the income, under the assumption that you just wrote up that backdated document when the tax office adjusted your tax with penalties”. I’m not kidding.
German criminal law as a concept of something like “unavoidable error”; I encountered it (in the press) in a case where a medical doctor was declared guilty of having done permanent bodily damage (having performed a permanent body modification procedure he was qualified to perform on a child, on request of the parents, without medical indication for the procedure), but was exempted from any punishment on the basis of “unavoidable error”. The court said that while he was not allowed to perform the procedure without medical indication without consent of the patient (and this being a child, the patient was unable to consent), if he had asked several different lawyers, he would have gotten several different answers. As in many lawyers would have said “yes, sure, go ahead, you have the valid request of the parents legitimately exercising parental authority, you are qualified to do it, that body modification is traditionally / socially considered as benign, acceptable and desirable/mandatory”. So he made an error, but that error was unavoidable.
That decision was later reversed, but let’s say that before it was reversed, I wouldn’t have pierced a child’s ears in Germany, even if I were trained to do it safely. It is a widely-accepted body modification for (pre)teens, and even for babies in a neighbouring country to the south-east, but that case was just too eerily similar.
But this is not a criminal case. It is a “finance of the state” (tax) case. I can easily believe that “unavoidable error” is not a defence there.
Land at a customs airfield
Where is the reference document, if it isn’t the AIP?
boscomantico wrote:
Land at a customs airfield.
The point is that the AIP said that this was a customs field, and the airport itself was genuinely convinced it was a customs field. With PPR for non-Schengen states, which the pilot was convinced of having respected even though he was not coming from a non-Schengen state and thus didn’t need PPR, by advising the airport. In such cases of customs having to be pre-arranged, usually the airport advises customs.
Vladimir,
yes, the text was not only wrong, but also very poorly written (as is very often the case unfortunately). But as I wrote, if he had complied with what was in the AIP (whether it correctly reflected reality or not) he would have called customs 24h before and they would have informed him that this doesn’t work.
Many people seem to think that an entry such as the above means that they need to get PPR 24h prior from the airportUnderline, in order to get customs clearance. But it doesn’t. It says you have to call customs directly to sort this out. It if were otherwise, why would they put their telephone numbers.
Of course it’s not forbidden to delegate this task, but you might have to love with it if something goes wrong. That easy.
Customs matters are just way too serious (much more serious than immiogration matters) to delegate them to some Flugleiter chap, doing this on a 450€ basis, or even for nothing in his free time. And even if you do delegate it, always get it IN WRITING that customs have been sorted.
Lionel, see my reply to Vladimir.
Peter wrote:
If consulting the AIP and phoning the airport is not due diligence, what is?
Some people are due to say “phoning customs at the number in the AIP”. I must say that I tried that, multiple times (customs and immigration), and nothing ever came out of it. The person on the phone just doesn’t get what I want. They say stuff like “the airline will arrange the presence of customs checks, you don’t have to” or “there are no direct flights between the airports you mention”. When I insist that I’m the PIC and I will do that direct flight, after some time, they bail out by giving me a different number (e.g. the customs office of the neighbouring bigger commercial airport where I’m not flying to) and/or an email address (e.g. “here’s the email for my whole team, I haven’t got a clue what I should do about you, but someone else on the team will ready your email and will know”). The email usually doesn’t give any answer or acknowledgement, and the customs office of the bigger airport definitely has more clue, but it is not their remit; they do checks at that airport, not the one I’m flying to.
boscomantico wrote:
if he had complied with the AIP
He didn’t have to comply with the text from the AIP quoted in this thread because it didn’t affect him: he was not coming from non-Schengen. I don’t have the full text of the AIP but if this was the only entry, it makes the situation about Schengen countries needing customs quite open, i.e. there is nothing written about this case. Which leaves everything to interpretation like “well, you should have called and checked explicitly, your duty as PIC”.
I am not saying he didn‘t get shafted. And I applaud the initiative.
But customs at small airfields (i.e. with PPR requirements) is always a delicate subject. So instead of doing various little, but useless things (remark in flightplan, verbally insisting with the Flugleiter…) he should have done ONE crucial thing: get the OK from customs. I know, always easy in hindsight, but just sayin‘…
While belonging to Schengen, you still have to check with customs when entering the EU from Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Maximum customs free value is 430€ travelling by air.
The entry in the AIP is misleading for sure, and I´m almost certain there are other airfields which are not entitled to customs duty anymore without knowing it. But come on, this guy even insisted on calling the police to make sure everything was fine.
Now what will the action of this customs agency make some people think about in the future when planning a trip abroad? I seriously doubt anybody would have noticed if no flight plan had been filed and at Wuerzburg he had stated Freiburg as his point of departure.
What should one do if Customs are not answering the phone (the usual position in certain countries) and their fax machine is not answering? And email is not a proof of anything…
This sort of thing has the potential to really kill off GA travel from certain regions.
