A German standup comedian who provoked a major diplomatic row between Berlin and Ankara over a poem insulting the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been told he will not face prosecution.
German prosecutors said on Tuesday that they had dropped their investigation into Jan Böhmermann because of insufficient evidence he had committed a crime.
Böhmermann created a furore at the end of March when he read a poem on state TV in which he lampooned the Turkish leader, arguing that he was doing so to test the boundaries of satire. The Turkish government had previously demanded the removal of a satirical song from another German comedy show.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, was widely criticised for appearing to give in to Ankara’s demands for Böhmermann to be prosecuted under an obscure paragraph of the German legal code forbidding offensive remarks against organs or representatives of foreign states. Such insults are theoretically punishable by up to three years in prison, and up to five years if the insults are considered slanderous.
Böhmermann said at the time that he felt Merkel had “filleted me [and] served me up for tea” to Erdoğan, warning that she risked damaging freedom of speech in Germany.
But on Tuesday, prosecutors in Mainz said “criminal actions could not be proven with the necessary certainty” and that the charges would be dropped. They said the poem was protected by so-called Kunstfreiheit, or artistic freedom.
However, legal proceedings are still not over for Böhmermann. On 2 November, a Hamburg court will decide whether a private prosecution that Erdoğan himself has brought against the comic can go ahead.
Erdoğan’s lawyer, Michael-Hubertus von Sprenger, said his aim was to enforce a complete ban of the poem, which includes references to child pornography, bestiality, repressing minorities, kicking Kurds and slapping Christians.
