German court shoots down Erdogan's legal motion against media boss

Cologne, Germany (dpa) - An appeals court in western Germany on Tuesday upheld a lower court‘s rejection of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan‘s motion for an injunction against the head of media giant Axel Springer, according to a statement on the court‘s website.The lower court had in May dismissed Erdogan‘s attempt to take legal action against Mathias Doepfner for the German media executive‘s praise of Jan Boehmermann.German comedian Boehmermann triggered a diplomatic crisis between Berlin and Ankara by reciting a lewd poem on March 31 that insulted the Turkish head of state.Doepfner had published an open letter to Boehmermann praising the poem, which joked that Erdogan watches child pornography and performs sex acts with animals."I would like, Mr Boehmermann, to completely affiliate myself with all of your formulations and verbal abuse as a precaution and to make them in every legal sense my own," Doepfner wrote in the letter.The appeals court came to the same conclusion as the lower court that Doepfner‘s statements fell under freedom of speech protections.