1667:25 Violence, Health Harm and the Denial of the Rights of Autistic People in Germany
Proceedings before the Social Court Cottbus and the Higher Social Court Berlin-Brandenburg
On the Practical Impossibility of Enforcing Effective Legal Protection for Neurodivergent People
Author: Timothy Speed
ORCID: 0009-0002-0143-5949
Published: March 6, 2026
Version: 1 English
Zenodo record: https://zenodo.org/records/18887765
PDF download: Speed_2026_1667-25_v1_en.pdf
Abstract
The following paper is one of the most extensive documented analyses to date of state violence against neurodivergent people and the poor in Germany. It examines, with an unusual density of data, a series of social court and administrative law proceedings in which a neurodivergent applicant attempted to make fundamental rights – in particular access to autism diagnostics, disability-related accommodations, subsistence-securing benefits, and health protection – practically effective.
What becomes visible is how the German state harms the health of neurodivergent people through unsuitable or failing administrative structures (Bürgergeld system / social courts / medical care), while protective mechanisms structurally fail. In the context of the WCA scandal in England, this study reveals a repetition of the same situation of endangerment that there led to numerous deaths and suicides.
What emerges is a dramatic picture of the state’s inability to prevent foreseeable health damage and deaths among neurodivergent people that are caused by state action, which raises the most serious concern.
Parallels to the Contergan/Thalidomide scandal also become apparent, particularly regarding the authorities’ treatment of the victims, but also with respect to the scale of health damage.
This paper stands in the context of the ten-year investigation already published in the book Speed’s Work, which documents massive violence against the poor, neurodivergent people, and other marginalized groups – violence of which state authorities, public prosecutors, and ministers knew that it caused health damage, yet continued nevertheless. Judges, politicians, public prosecutors, and other employees of the state were and remain involved in this violence to this day.
The starting point of this new investigation is the massive diagnostic emergency in the field of autism, which exists internationally and is enormous in Germany as well. In the course of this investigation, 1,667 affected individuals competed in one quarter, through a lottery procedure, for 25 diagnostic places at Humboldt University in Berlin, effectively making access to medically necessary autism diagnostics dependent on chance.
Because the diagnosis is a prerequisite for almost all further social law claims, a systemic effect arises: without diagnosis no rights – without rights no stabilization – without stabilization no possibility of enforcing the diagnosis. Since only few studies to date have examined the consequences of this emergency in detail, this paper provides an important empirical basis beyond Germany.
On the basis of eight court proceedings, several urgent proceedings before Social Courts and Higher Social Courts, internal administrative statements, reactions by court presidents, as well as the refusal of intervention by the Office of the General Public Prosecutor despite risk to life, the study examines how shifts of jurisdiction, fragmentation of legal domains, formal narrowing of claims, and delay condense into a de facto suspension of effective legal protection.
The central thesis is that what appears here is not primarily an individual wrong decision, but a systemic constellation in which access to justice is formally opened while materially being structurally blocked.
The data reveal a simulation of legality in which state action loses any connection to social reality and individuals are sacrificed in order to stabilize the system. Fundamental structural flaws become visible in social law, as well as in the criminal liability of institutions and their accountability (corporate crime and organizational liability / corporate manslaughter and corporate homicide).
It becomes clearly visible how the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is disregarded at crucial points in Germany, or simply cannot be enforced.
The data of the long-term investigation show that a General Public Prosecutor in Germany can watch, without consequence, as an autistic person is gradually forced into mortal danger through the withdrawal of fundamental rights by authorities. As the practical test carried out here reveals, no real functioning protection exists against indirect killing through state measures.
Germany also collects no data at all on deaths caused by the state, meaning that what occurred in England (600 suicides) remains statistically invisible in Germany. The question of what state violence against the poor and people with disabilities actually means for those affected has so far been insufficiently investigated. Why autistic people internationally have an estimated life expectancy reduced by up to 16 years can partly be better understood on the basis of the data presented in this study.
This study places the frequently occurring, foreseeable health damage among neurodivergent people into the space of the highest urgency, as well as the failure of authorities to react to threats to health and even threats to life, and it likely provides for the first time a scientific basis for assessing the enforceability of the fundamental rights of neurodivergent people in a European country such as Germany.
Methodologically, the work (qualitative research) combines legal analysis with documented lived impact. The author acts not only as an external observer but also as part of the experimental arrangement (“provoked empiricism”): applications, complaints, and danger notifications function as empirical measuring instruments in order to make visible how institutions react under conditions of known vulnerability.
The emotional dimension – in particular the medically described risk posed by continuous administrative stress in autism – is treated not as rhetorical exaggeration but as part of the evidentiary basis.
In the light of international human rights concepts, the events are classified as forms of Structural Violence, Procedural Violence, Epistemic Violence, and Safeguarding Failure. Particular attention is given to the question of whether and why foreseeable health damage is knowingly accepted despite awareness of the situation.
This work serves as a human-rights basis aimed at preventing further suffering as far as possible, and as a submission for examination by the responsible EU and UN institutions in Brussels and Geneva, as well as by the German Federal Constitutional Court. This paper has also been submitted to the General Public Prosecutor of Brandenburg together with a criminal complaint, as well as to the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs in Berlin.
Through this documentation, testimony is intended to be given to the fatal situation of neurodivergent people.
At the same time, the present investigation functions within the author’s overall body of work as a methodological bridge between theoretical work, documentation, and institutional experience. It reconstructs not only concrete legal conflicts but also makes visible how structural blockages themselves become an epistemic environment that shapes the form, tone, and persistence of neurodivergent research.
In this way, the paper contributes to clarifying the conditions under which self-determined neurodivergent knowledge production emerges and shows why its forms of expression are often misunderstood or delegitimized when this contextual structure is not taken into account.