German Court Hears Erdogan's New Challenge against TV Comic

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's battle against a German comic over a satirical poem went to the next round Wednesday, as a court in northern Germany began hearing a civil case brought by the Turkish leader.

The row erupted in late March when Jan Boehmermann recited his so-called Defamatory Poem with a broad grin on national television, satirically accusing the Turkish president of bestiality and pedophilia.

It unleashed a bitter row between Germany and Turkey at a particularly sensitive moment as Europe looked to Ankara to help stem a record influx of migrants.

Erdogan sought to bring a criminal case against Boehmermann under rarely enforced 19th-century lese majeste laws, but German prosecutors rejected the claim as they found the satire so exaggerated it could not be taken seriously.

The Turkish leader is now seeking a complete ban on the satirical poem through the civil case, with the first court hearing beginning Wednesday in the northern German city of Hamburg in the absence of the plaintiff and defendant.

Urging the court to ban the poem, Erdogan's lawyer Michael-Hubertus von Sprenger argued that "it is coarse, and I almost want to call them late-puberty insults" that were made "under the cloak of art."

But Boehmermann's lawyer said the poem was "nothing but satire."

The comic himself had said the piece was intended to provoke and that it would flout Germany's legal limits to free speech before reading it out.

He had intended it as a reaction to Ankara's decision to summon Germany's ambassador over another satirical song broadcast on German TV, which lampooned Erdogan in far tamer language.

The saga proved deeply embarrassing for Merkel, who was criticized for compromising basic values to placate Ankara when she allowed an investigation under sector 103 of the criminal code -- insulting organs or representatives of foreign states -- to go ahead in Erdogan's earlier criminal challenge.

The chancellor herself stood by her decision, describing it as "fair", but she expressed regret that her spokesman Steffen Seibert had said she viewed the poem as "deliberately insulting."

"With hindsight, it was an error," Merkel said back in April, adding that the remark could have given the impression that "freedom of opinion is not important, that freedom of the press is not important."

As a result of the embarrassing affair, Merkel has since announced that Germany would by 2018 scrap section 103 of the criminal code.