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EU-VOTE-GERMANY-MEDIA-FAR-RIGHT
German neo-Nazi party loses bid to air anti-migrant advert
BERLIN, April 28, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – A German neo-Nazi party has lost a
bid before the country’s highest court to force a national public broadcaster
to show one of its campaign adverts.
The Federal Constitutional Court late Saturday upheld rulings by two
lower tribunals that the free-speech rights of the National Party of Germany
(NPD) had not been violated.
ZDF public television had opted not to show the NPD commercial for next
month’s European elections, which claimed that “migration kills” and called
for “protection zones” for Germans.
The broadcaster had decided that the advert amounted to incitement of
racial hatred, a crime in Germany. The NPD disputed this claim in a Facebook
post on Thursday.
ZDF’s assessment had been backed by the superior administrative court in
Rhineland-Palatinate state as well as the administrative court in Mainz,
where ZDF is based.
The Constitutional Court said in a statement that it had rejected the
NPD’s appeal as there were “no grounds to think that the courts failed to
uphold the plaintiff’s freedom of speech”.
Fellow public broadcaster ARD has also refused to show the commercial,
which was due to run from April 29 to May 15. It said it was unaware of any
legal challenge to the decision by the NPD.
The NPD has seats in many town halls in the ex-communist east of the
country but has negligible poll ratings at the national level.
Germany’s upper house of parliament lost a bid in 2017 to ban the NPD,
as the Constitutional Court ruled the xenophobic fringe group was too
insignificant to pose a real threat to the democratic order.
The far-right AfD party, which has also railed against Chancellor Angela
Merkel’s decision to allow in more than one million asylum seekers during a
2015-16 influx, is polling around 10 percent ahead of the European Parliament
elections.
BSS/AFP/RY/1948 hrs