German Court Bans Large Parts of Poem Insulting Erdogan

Jan Boehmermann, host of the late-night “Neo Magazin Royale” on the public ZDF channel is pictured during a TV show of Markus Lanz in Hamburg, Germany, August 21, 2012. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has filed a complaint against a comedian who recited a satirical and sexually crude poem about him on German television, complicating Berlin’s attempts to get Turkey’s help in dealing with Europe’s migrant crisis. (Photo: REUTERS)

Hamburg: 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.