German police criticised for treatment of AfD-supporting teenager
The 17-year-old is a vocal supporter of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has portrayed her as a martyr to the country's restrictions on free speech.
She became a national cause célèbre in February last year after the headmaster of her school in Ribnitz-Damgarten, a town between Rostock and Stralsund on the Baltic coast, received an anonymous email alleging that she was publishing extremist videos on TikTok, the social media platform.
• AfD designated as 'right-wing extremist' by German intelligence
The incident is widely known in Germany as the 'Smurf case' because the girl had written that 'the Smurfs are blue and so is east Germany', a reference to the AfD's party colours and its strong performance in polls ahead of regional elections.
However, it appears that the investigation related to eight other posts, including one where she had used the nativist slogan 'No 'Yallah Yallah' — in Germany we speak German', which derides migrants' use of Arabic in the county.
In another, she posted 'Homeland, liberty, tradition, last stop for multiculturalism', words associated with the right-wing extremist Identitarian movement.
She also released a video of herself surrounded by nationalist symbols such as runes and wearing a jacket that bore the initials 'HH', the logo of the manufacturer Helly Hansen but which could also have been interpreted as an abbreviation of 'Heil Hitler'.
The headmaster informed local police and three armed officers entered the school while the girl, who was 16 at the time, was in the middle of a class. The head took her out of the classroom and the officers questioned her in his office.
The teenager was notified that she was being treated as a potential danger to the German state and might be breaking the law by using banned political symbols or publishing other kinds of extremist content.
Ultimately, the schoolgirl was not charged. Police said there had been insufficient grounds to suspect her of extremism in the first place.
The AfD turned the case into an emblem of the supposed persecution of right-wing views by the authorities. Alice Weidel, the party's co-leader and candidate for the chancellorship, called it an 'intolerable transgression'.
The incident also drew international attention, the tech billionaire Elon Musk among those expressing surprise at her arrest.
The girl's family then sued the police force and the interior ministry of the local Mecklenburg-West Pomerania region. Their lawyer, Ralf Stark, compared the girl's treatment to the socialist police state of the former East Germany.
On Tuesday, the administrative court in Greifswald ruled that the police had broken the law because their approach had been out of proportion to the seriousness of the allegations against the girl. 'There would have been gentler measures than immediately taking the schoolgirl out of class and taking her to the school office alongside police officers in full view of the rest of the school,' the court said.
• What is AfD? The reasons behind rise of the hard right in Germany
A separate lawsuit brought by the family against the head teacher and the education ministry has yet to begin.
The girl's mother told Junge Freiheit, a newspaper aligned with the AfD: 'My daughter should be rehabilitated. It's important that my daughter receives justice here because she committed no crime, and both the interior and education ministries have always defended the behaviour of the police and the head teacher.'
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