Investigation Dropped Against German Comedian, Jan Böhmermann, for Insulting Turkish President

German prosecutors dropped their case on October 4 against German comedian Jan Böhmermann, who had been under investigation since April 2016 when he read a poem insulting Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. The investigation started after Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) television show, Neo Magazin Royale, featured the comedian criticizing Erdogan’s policy towards Kurds and broadcasting conspiracies about the president watching child pornography.

To justify their decision to drop the case, the German prosecutors claimed that there was not enough evidence to classify Böhmermann’s comment as a serious insult against the Turkish government. The prosecutors admitted that the poem was clearly an “exaggerated portrayal” and that any listener should have recognized it as an insignificant joke. The prosecutors stopped the investigation after accepting Böhmermann’s stance that the speech was satirical. Since the investigation has been dropped, Böhmermann has argued that his original intent was merely to demonstrate the difference between satire and a serious accusation.

The end of the investigation shed light on Germany’s law codes that allowed the case against Jan Böhmermann to proceed in the first place. In April, the German government, defending its investigation, cited Paragraph 103 in Germany’s penal code, which gives extensive investigational rights  to protect foreign leaders from insults. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in hopes of protecting the EU’s ongoing migrant deal with Turkey, invoked this law despite being criticized for restricting freedom of speech and conceding more power to the Turkish government. Now, former critics of Merkel are using the failed investigation into Jan Böhmermann as an opportunity to request the abolishment of Paragraph 103, which they view as an archaic law. Senior Social Democrat Thomas Oppermann expressed this sentiment, noting that “lese majeste [offending foreign heads of state] is a relic from the last century” and therefore, the process of abolishment should be accelerated.