The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a backlog of court cases in Germany that will have to be dealt with in the coming months. During the COVID-19 crisis, the courts mainly handled important criminal cases, urgent detention cases and summary proceedings. In the vast majority of cases, however, they had to cancel negotiations by the end of April, managing director of the German Association of Judges ("Deutscher Richterbund") Sven Rebehn told the newspapers of the Funke-Mediengruppe.  

However, in many courts, the trial dates had already risen to half of the usual or more during May. Sven Rebehn pointed out that there were by no means courtrooms that were large enough to comply with the applicable distance rules. "In addition, many lawyers are now working at full capacity, which makes it even more difficult to quickly schedule proceedings", he said (see Marbacher Zeitung press article dated 7 June 2020 in German). 

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