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Top German Judge
Says Far-Right Party Ban Possible
By Dave Graham
BERLIN (Reuters) – A controversial far-right party in Germany could be banned despite the failure of an earlier attempt to outlaw it, the head of Germany’s highest court was quoted as saying by a newspaper on
Saturday.
in which every journalist is required to swear a six point undertaking, including
- to print only the truth
- not to criticise Jews, whatever
their actions - not to publish any information
detrimental to the reputation of
Israel
the
Left-wing agitators. And guess whom the
Supreme Court then sides with?
Papier said that although the court threw out a government bid to ban the NPD in 2003, future attempts could still succeed.
“The suspension of proceedings to ban (the party) then, does not represent a pre-ordained decision on future efforts to ban (it),” Papier wrote in a guest contribution for Germany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper, due to appear on
Sunday.
“These facts need to be remembered,” he added.
In Kiel, demonstrators threw bottles and stones at police protecting some 450 supporters of the NPD as they attended a public address by the party.
Discontent over the NPD event drew around 7,000
protesters, according to police estimates.
“There (were) massive and hard clashes,” a police spokesman said, adding that tires and rubbish containers had been set on fire and that police had sprayed protesters with a water cannon.
Police said over 40
largely left-wing demonstrators were detained.
Many street signs and shop windows were
vandalized.
The center-left government has likened the NPD to the embryonic Nazi party and tried to have it outlawed on the grounds that it stirred racial hatred.
Despite Papier’s comments, Bavaria’s Interior
Minister Guenther Beckstein, who in 2000
kickstarted the push for the NPD ban, advised against a fresh initiative for the moment.
“I want to remind people that the NPD ban proceedings failed due to a minority (vote) among the judges — the majority wanted to continue proceedings,” he told Reuters by telephone.
The opposition conservative lawmaker said a ban would require a three-quarters majority in the constitutional court.
Prior to its ruling,
the court had suspended proceedings after it
emerged the government’s case against the NPD
included testimony and
speeches
from paid
informants.
The NPD, which seeks to promote policies that favor ethnic Germans and is strongly anti-Jewish, produced the far-right’s best showing in six years in September when it won nearly 10 percent of the vote in state elections in Saxony.
It provoked outrage last week by walking out of a minute’s silence for Nazi victims and referring to Allied strikes
[Website: saturation bombing attacks which killed 100,000 civilians and refugees in two hours] on the German city of Dresden in 1945 as a “bombing holocaust.”
© 2005 The
Washington Post Company