A court in Hamburg has upheld the ruling of a lower court which prohibited German public media from spreading false information about the so-called ‘Potsdam meeting.’
As we reported earlier, a ruling in July by the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg prohibits public broadcasters from repeating the false allegation that participants at a meeting in Potsdam last November discussed the expulsion of German citizens of foreign origin.
After an appeal by public broadcaster NDR, the Regional Court of Hamburg also issued the decision on Monday, September 23rd, that NDR and its flagship news programme Tagesschau must stop repeating the false claims originally made by the state-funded left-wing investigative website Correctiv.
The case revolves around an article by Correctiv at the beginning of the year, which made claims of a top-level meeting in Potsdam between members of the anti-globalist opposition Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, the right-wing Identitarian Movement, and the centre-right CDU party, alleging the existence of a right-wing plot to deport millions of migrants, including those with German citizenship.
It later turned out that the publication had deceptively misreported the event. There were no discussions about deporting people holding a German passport. The meeting had actually focused on a more restrictive migration policy and the deportation of rejected asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.
Other media, including NDR, have repeated these false allegations, and one of the participants of the Potsdam meeting, constitutional law expert Ulrich Vosgerau, has won court cases against both Correctiv and public media outlets.
Despite previous court rulings which clearly stated that the allegations about the Potsdam meeting were untrue, NDR has refused to remove these articles from the Tagesschau website.
“The narrative of Correctiv has been refuted for months. But the mainstream media have imposed a kind of news blackout on this issue, and to this day want their readers and viewers to believe that the false allegations were in fact correct,” Ulrich Vosgerau told Junge Freiheit.
NDR could face a fine of up €250,000, or imprisonment of those responsible, if it does not comply with the court order.
