DECISION
In the legal dispute
xxx,
Applicant,
Legal representative:
Attorney Sven Adam
Lange, Geismarstraße 55, 37073 Göttingen
against
Werra-Meißner district, represented by the district committee, legal department 3.1,
Schlossplatz 1, 37269 Eschwege
Respondent,
The 11th Chamber of the Social Court of Kassel decided on January 20, 2020, through Judge xxx as Chairwoman of the Social Court:
The respondent shall bear the applicant's necessary extrajudicial costs.
REASONS
The admissible application for costs is well-founded. Pursuant to Section 193 Paragraph 1 of the Social Courts Act (SGG), the court must decide by judgment whether and to what extent the parties must reimburse each other's costs. The court must decide by order upon application if the proceedings are terminated otherwise (as in the present case by the declaration of settlement by the legal representative) (Section 193 Paragraph 1 Sentence 3 SGG). The SGG does not contain an explicit provision regarding the conditions under which costs are to be reimbursed. Therefore, the legal principles of Sections 91 et seq. of the Code of Civil Procedure (ZPO) must be considered (see Meyer/Ladewig et al., SGG with commentary, 12th edition, Section 193, marginal notes 13 et seq.). When the legal dispute is settled by a declaration of settlement, the court must apply the legal principle of Section 91a ZPO, according to which the question of costs must be decided at its equitable discretion, taking into account the previous state of the proceedings and the merits of the case.
Despite the respondent's detailed statement on the issue of costs dated December 20, 2019, the court, in light of the outcome of the proceedings, which included the respondent's admission of liability, deems it appropriate to order the respondent to bear the costs of the preliminary injunction proceedings. While the application for preliminary injunction, filed with the Kassel Social Court on November 12, 2019, addressed not only the amount of benefits under the Asylum Seekers' Benefits Act (AsylbLG) but also, for the first time, the prerequisites for so-called analogous benefits under Section 2 of the AsylbLG, the applicant's legal representative had already submitted a review request to the respondent on July 4, 2019, regarding the amount of benefits under the AsylbLG. Neither the respondent's decision of July 9, 2019, rejecting the review, nor the subsequent appeal proceedings addressed the issue of analogous benefits under Section 2 of the AsylbLG. This only occurred in the aforementioned application for preliminary injunction. In the preliminary injunction proceedings, the respondent, based on the information and documents provided by the applicant's legal representative, acknowledged the applicant's eligibility for benefits under Section 2 of the Asylum Seekers' Benefits Act (AsylbLG) as early as April 29, 2019. The applicant's legal representative then accepted this acknowledgment and declared the legal dispute settled. Even though the investigation results only prompted the respondent, during the preliminary injunction proceedings before the Kassel Social Court, to acknowledge the higher benefits under the AsylbLG sought by the applicant for the eight months retroactive to the date the application for preliminary injunction was filed with the court, the respondent would have been obligated, ex officio, to review the benefit amount from all legal and factual perspectives as soon as the review application was filed in early July 2019. Ultimately, the applicant only achieved his goal of higher benefits under the Asylum Seekers' Benefits Act (AsylbLG) in the aforementioned proceedings because the respondent had previously failed to thoroughly review the applicant's benefits in the review process. Therefore, the court finds the respondent obligated to cover the applicant's extrajudicial costs.
The decision is unappealable pursuant to Section 172 Paragraph 3 No. 3 of the Social Court Act (SGG).
