Arne Semsrott

Arne Semsrott studied political science.^[1]

Semsrott attended the Catholic high school Sophie Barat Schule in Hamburg. In school, he founded the satirical school newspaper Sophie's Underworld (German: Sophies Unterwelt) together with his older brother, Nico Semsrott at the Hamburg Sophie-Barat-Schule [de]. Its sale was banned on the school grounds by the school's headmistress, though it was continued to be sold from a portable toilet.^[2][3] Semsrott has been working as a freelance journalist since 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, he studied political science in Berlin and Istanbul. Since 2014, he has been director of the freedom of information initiativ FragDenStaat at the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, for which he received the Otto Brenner Award in both 2015 and 2016. He is co-initiator of the OpenSCHUFA initiative, which was nominated for the Grimme Online Award, and has been on the board of lobby watchdog LobbyControl [de] since October 2018. In 2021, Semsrott founded the Freiheitsfonds initiative.^[4][5] The organisation raises funds to free prisoners who have been incarcerated under the substitute imprisonment law, which allows judges to impose custodial sentences for unpaid public transport fares.^[6] It also advocates decriminalising the act of riding on public transport without a ticket, which was made an offence by the Nazi party in 1935.^[7][8] As of September 2023, Semsrott and Freiheitsfonds had raised more than €800,000 and allowed 850 people to leave prison early.^[9]

Semsrott is co-initiator of “OpenSCHUFA” and an author at netzpolitik.org.