April 13, 2016•Update: April 20, 2016
BERLIN
Turkish president’s defamation suit against a German comedian aims to prevent any similar abusive insults in the future, lawyer for the president has said.
German comedian Jan Bohmermann sparked an uproar in Turkey with his sexually crude and insulting poem about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which he read two weeks ago on the public broadcaster ZDFneo.
Michael-Hubertus von Sprenger, the president’s Munich-based lawyer, told ZDF Tuesday night that he would use all legal means to pursue the case.
"The president is determined that the person concerned will be punished and also that he will not repeat what he had said in future,” von Sprenger said.
“That was necessary to bring him back to the right path, create satire and not make crude insults anymore,” he added.
Bohmermann claimed his poem only wanted to highlight the supposed lack of human rights in Turkey; however, several critics saw the poem as racist and abusive remarks, which exceeded the limits of freedom of expression.
Eventually, the German public broadcaster removed it from its web page on April 1 and also deleted it from its archive.
Apart from Erdogan’s personal criminal complaint against the comedian, Turkish Foreign Ministry also protested against his show and demanded prosecution in a diplomatic note sent to the German Foreign Ministry last week.
According to a little-used legislation, Article 103 of the German penal code, any German citizen who insults a foreign head of state can face imprisonment not exceeding three years or a fine, but in case of a slanderous insult, imprisonment can be between three months and five years.
Article 104a of the same law states that such offences can only be prosecuted if the foreign government concerned makes a request to the federal German government, and it accepts this request.
German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said Wednesday that the government was still examining Turkey’s request, and would conclude its assessment within days.
Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticized the comedian’s poem as a “deliberate insult” to Erdogan, but also underlined the great importance her government attaches to freedom of expression and media.
Merkel has come under growing criticism for not rejecting Ankara’s request to open a court case against Bohmermann, and shying away from criticizing Turkey due to Ankara’s key role as a partner in solving the refugee crisis.
On Wednesday, her spokesman dismissed growing criticism against the government by the opposition and several media outlets.
"Yes, for us the implementation of the EU-Turkey agreement on the refugee issues is very important. Both Germany and Turkey have an interest in the success of this agreement,” Seibert told a press conference in Berlin.
“But completely independent from all these, we are clearly committed to Article 5 of our constitution, to freedom of thought, freedom of science and artistic freedoms. As our chancellor made it clear yesterday, this is non-negotiable both at home and abroad,” he said.
