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Germany's top court begins hearing of banning far-right NPD party

Xinhua, March 2, 2016 Adjust font size:

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court started on Tuesday hearing arguments with regard to banning the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD).

The hearing is scheduled to run for three days. This case hinges on the question of whether the NPD, often described as a neo-Nazi organization, poses a threat to Germany's constitution and democratic order.

The Bundesrat - the upper house of German parliament which represents Germany's 16 states - brought the case forward in 2013, saying the party is a platform of promoting violence and racism.

The German government supports the case although it is not formally a part of the file against the party.

German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said the NPD trial was pathbreaking. He noted the process did not mean that the fight against right-wing forces was over and that "racism and extremism must be weeded out from people's heads."

The NPD has never crossed the national 5-percent threshold to enter the Bundestag, the lower house of German parliament. However, it has seats in the state parliament in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and is also represented in several city councils in eastern Germany as well as in the European Parliament.

It is the second attempt to prohibit the NPD.

The Bundestag, the Bundesrat and the German government first sought to ban the party in 2001, but the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe in southern Germany closed proceedings after it was revealed that Germany's domestic intelligence agency had infiltrated the NPD all the way up to the executive level.

By embedding agents in the NPD's leadership, the state had put itself in the position of creating evidence or influencing the party's actions in ways that could help the ban effort, according to media reports.

The judges rejected this practice and did not further examine the NPD to determine whether it was an anti-constitutional party.

The Bundesrat said in 2013 that all of the agents had been "deactivated" when it submitted a new application in 2013 to close down the NPD. Endit