A German magazine’s publishing ban to be decided in court
The hearing in the case of the ban on the magazine Compact is set to continue on Wednesday at the Federal Administrative Court. After an eight-hour first day of hearings, the session was adjourned in the late afternoon.
The proceedings began with a focus on legal intricacies, a discussion about the course of the further procedure and the association law, which was invoked by the former Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser, in July 2024, when she ordered the operation of the Compact Magazine GmbH and a connected company to cease. The justification: the magazine is a “mouthpiece of the right-extremist scene”. The Federal Administrative Court had already partially suspended the immediate enforcement of the ban in August 2024, since when the magazine has been publishing provisionally and a final decision is now to be made.
Editor-in-Chief Jürgen Elsässer presented an issue of the magazine featuring a portrait of Adolf Hitler and the headline “Who financed Hitler” to the cameras on Tuesday and continued to make provocative statements, seemingly in an ironic sense: “In my marriage, my wife wears the pants. But in the editorial office, in the publishing house, I am the dictator” he said in court.
The Federal Administrative Court had initially scheduled three possible days of hearings. Whether these will be fully utilized and when a verdict might be delivered, was still uncertain on Tuesday evening. Compact’s lawyer, Ulrich Vosgerau, expressed optimism. If the magazine were to lose the case, he announced a potential appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court and, if necessary, to the European Court of Human Rights.