German court rules Afrin protest ban as ‘unlawful’
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – A German court ruled on Wednesday that it was unlawful for the German police to have banned a protest against the Turkish incursion into Afrin which was scheduled to take place last February, German media reported.
On Feb. 24, 2018, a Kurdish community center in Dusseldorf planned to protest Turkey’s military incursion on Afrin, which was controlled by the People’s Protection Units (YPG).
The local police force, however, banned the protest, arguing the center was linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is outlawed in Germany. In its ruling this week, the court decided the move by authorities to forbid the demonstration was “wrong.”
The court ruled the ban to have been a “disproportionate” response to the protest and that the authorities did not “sufficiently document the use of banned flags” used in previous demonstrations to make their case.
Turkish-backed forces occupied Afrin on March 18, 2018, and over 150,000 people from Afrin were displaced, with many living in poor conditions in camps in the Shahba region, northern Aleppo.
According to an expert report prepared for the German parliament, Turkey’s continued military presence in Syria fulfills the criteria of an occupation, Deutsche Welle reported in December.
“The Kurds are used to the German police and state suspending law when it comes to appeasing Turkey,” Dilar Dirik, a Kurdish activist and a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, tweeted.