The city of Mannheim was ordered by the Karlsruhe Administrative Court on Thursday to publish in its official gazette an article by City Councillor Julien Ferrat titled “Censorship in Mannheim’s Official Gazette Harms Democracy” (case file 1 K 8246/26). The ruling came on Tuesday, the court deciding that the municipality must carry the piece in its gazette. Ferrat’s move had ignited a weekslong dispute over whether the city’s office had wrongly rejected Ferrat’s swinger-party notices for publication in the gazette; by the end of August Ferrat did hold the party—without authorization and with nine participants (as TheColu.mn reported).
The current point of contention was the decision to publish another Ferrat article about the non-approval of his swinger-party announcement. The city administration had argued that the piece contained false claims. Yet the court, ruling on Ferrat’s urgent application, found that while the text might be “shortened or incomplete,” it did not cross the line into a false statement. The costs of the proceedings must be borne by the city of Mannheim.
“Whoever censors in the official gazette must live with the consequences,” Ferrat commented after the ruling. “Whenever the phrase ‘swinger party in the city hall’ came up, the city administration was frantically trying to reinterpret it as an ‘inaccuracy’ or a ‘false claim.’ It is not the city administration’s job to judge my political work or my political style. That is the job of the voters.”
The single city councilor from the voters’ initiative “Die Mannheimer” urged the administration to look up the Streisand effect on Google, a phenomenon in which attempts to suppress or delete unwanted information only amplify public attention.
