Merkel gallows sales allowed

A German court has allowed an opponent of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy to continue to sell miniature gallows with her name on them, after ruling that they were artworks and should not be taken seriously. Jens Doebel built a full-size gallows two years ago for a street demonstration in Dresden by antiimmigration movement Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West). The small wooden replicas he sells for €29.95 (NZ$52) have two nooses, for Merkel and her deputy Sigmar Gabriel. The public prosecutors’ office in Chemnitz, a city in Saxony where Pegida was founded, investigated a complaint that the models incited violence, which is punishable by a fine or up to five years in prison. Doebel argued that the model gallows were symbolic of the ‘‘political death’’ of the two leaders.