The German administrative court of Düsseldorf has once more rejected complaints from internet access providers in the district of Nordrhein-Westfalen against the order to block access to 2 neo-nazi websites hosted in the US. The order was issued in 2002 against 80 different service providers in the region.

The providers already saw 8 legal attempts fail to lift the order. Only 1 attempt, on 31 October 2002 at the administrative court of Minden, was successful, in allowing suspension of execution of the order pending full proceedings. All courts have approved the blocking order within the framework of the federal conventions on media services and youth media protection. The Duesseldorf court rejected any problems with the effectivity of the blocking order and followed an approach similar to the French court (see article above).

"Measures to block access to such neo-nazi internet sites can also apply to access providers, since measures against ISPs based in the US, where the sites are created and hosted, don't promise any success and the ISP filtering is technically possible and reasonable."

Today the district court in Stuttgart also tried the appeal case of Alvar Freude, who provided hyper-links to the two censored websites as part of an information campaign on censorship. The outcome is not yet known.

Verwaltungsgericht Düsseldorf bestätigt Sperrungsverfügung in NRW (14.06.2005)
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/60627

Heise report about the Alvar Freude case
Hyperlink-Prozess: "Essenzielle Fragen der Meinungs- und Informationsfreiheit" (13.06.2005)
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/60552

EDRI-gram: Germany attempts to censor website on censhorship (06.10.2004)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number2.19/censor