The Berlin public prosecutor’s office has said it would appeal the verdict in the controversial case of comedian Sebastian Hotz.
As a court speaker told news agency dpa on August 1, the prosecution had announced it would not accept the court’s ruling and would launch an appeal as soon as the written judgement was published.
This meant the comedian’s case will now be examined again either by the Berlin regional court or by the Berlin appeal court, depending on which appeal the prosecution chooses to launch.
The decision followed revelations by newspaper Junge Freiheit on July 24 that the judge who acquitted Hotz, Andrea Wilms, had participated in an event of the hard-left Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, the party foundation of Die Linke, the successor of the former East German Communist Unity party SED.
The revelations led to accusations of bias, as Hotz is a darling of the German political Left.
On 30 July, Hotz, who goes by the moniker of El Hotzo, had been acquitted by a local court in Berlin.
He had been charged with “condoning criminal offences” – a crime punishable by up to three years in prison, according to section 140 of the German Criminal Code – after a series of posts on X about the assassination attempt on then-US presidential candidate Donald Trump in July 2024.
Mere hours after the attempted assassination, Hotz – who has 740,000 followers on X – wrote: “What do the last bus and Donald Trump have in common? Unfortunately just missed.”
After users reacted negatively to the tasteless joke, Hotz added in a separate post: “I find it absolutely fantastic when fascists die.”
The prosecution had demanded a fine of €6,000 for the remarks, arguing that Hotz “created a psychological climate in society in which similar attacks on government officials or heads of state can flourish nationwide”.
Judge Wilms, though, acquitted Hotz of all charges after only 57 minutes deliberation. “You are comparing the US president to a public bus, that is clearly non-punishable satire,” Wilms said.
Independent journalist Boris Reitschuster accused the court of dishing out political justice, comparing the acquittal of Hotz over a “satirical” call for murder with the case of journalist David Bendels. He received a seven-month suspended jail sentence for posting a meme of former Social Democrat interior minister Nancy Faeser holding a sign reading: “I hate freedom of speech”.
“What we are witnessing – in many, though not all cases – is no longer independent jurisprudence, but a system of selective principles: prosecution based on ideology, leniency for the ‘good’ and harshness for the ‘wrong’ people,” Reitschuster wrote.
“The judiciary is becoming a disciplinary authority – not for criminals, but for dissenters.”
