German court bans large parts of poem insulting Erdogan
German court bans large parts of poem insulting Erdogan
February 10, 2017
Hamburg (AFP) - A German court Friday barred a TV
comedian from reciting in full his so-called "defamatory poem"
against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan which sparked a diplomatic row
last year.
In the poem, broadcast in March 2016, satirist Jan
Boehmermann accused Erdogan of bestiality and watching child porn, while
gleefully admitting he was flouting legal limits to free speech as a deliberate
provocation.
The Hamburg civil court, upholding a ruling from last
May, barred Boehmermann from repeating lengthy passages of the poem, objecting
to 18 of its 24 lines.
It ruled that the claimant "does not have to accept
insults or verbal abuse", even if the offensive passages were clearly not
intended to be taken seriously.
The Turkish leader had sought a complete ban on the poem.
Boehmermann's performance sparked a row that badly soured
Berlin-Ankara relations at a time when Turkey was vital to EU plans to stop the
mass flow of migrants from the Middle East and Africa into the bloc, especially
to Germany.
Erdogan had also sought to bring a criminal case against
Boehmermann under a rarely enforced lese majeste law, but German prosecutors
rejected the claim as they found the satire so exaggerated it could not be
taken seriously.
German lawmakers voted last month to strike the
19th-century lese majeste law, which threatened jail terms for insulting
foreign heads of state, from Germany's legal code.
The comedian's poem came in reaction to Ankara's decision
to summon Germany's ambassador over another satire, a song broadcast on German
TV which had lampooned Erdogan in far tamer language.
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