Germany Allows For Insulting Foreign Leaders

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Germany is to abolish an ‘outdated’ 19th-century law that prohibits insulting a foreign head of state.

It comes after Turkey tried to use the law to prosecute German comedian Jan Böhmermann for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a poem broadcast March last year on German TV.

German Justice Minister Heiko Maas says the law belongs to “an era long gone” and is “outdated and unnecessary.”

The Local reports:

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The German government voted Wednesday to scrap a “lese majeste” law that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had sought to employ against a popular German television satirist.

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Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet decided to abolish by January 1st, 2018 the rarely enforced section of the criminal code that prohibits insulting organs or representatives of foreign states.

“The idea of ‘lese majeste’ dates back to a long-gone era, it no longer belongs in our criminal law,” said Justice Minister Heiko Maas.

“The regulation is obsolete and unnecessary.”

Maas said heads of state and government would still be able to defend themselves against slander and defamation “but no more or less so than any other person.”

Erdogan had launched a criminal complaint under the law – which carries up to three years’ jail – against German TV comic Jan Böhmermann, who had insulted him in a so-called “defamatory poem”.

The row badly soured Berlin-Ankara relations at a time when Turkey was vital to European Union plans to stop the mass flow of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa into the bloc, especially to Germany.

In the poem, broadcast in March last year, Böhmermann had accused Erdogan of bestiality and watching child porn, while gleefully admitting that he was flouting legal limits to free speech as a deliberate provocation.