Court dismisses Gil Ofarim’s bias appeal against judges

The trial at the Leipzig Regional Court against the musician Gil Ofarim can probably begin as planned. Ofarim’s lawyers failed with a motion for bias against the judge at the Higher Regional Court dealing with the case. There are no legal remedies against the decision, a spokeswoman said.

In 2021, in a video that went viral, the musician accused the employee of a Leipzig hotel of having asked him to take off his necklace with a Star of David when he checked in. The employee concerned denies the incident. In addition, there were doubts about Ofarim’s portrayal after videos from surveillance cameras apparently did not show such a chain.

As a result, Ofarim was accused of false accusation and defamation. The presiding judge at the Leipzig Regional Court made several public statements about the case and said, according to the newspaper’s “Bild”, that there was “known to be no significant problem with anti-Semitism” in Leipzig. He later said that he could not imagine anti-Semitism in a high-priced hotel.

Ofarim’s lawyers wanted to have the judge biased on the statements, as they showed that he was biased on the issue of anti-Semitism. If the appeals were successful, the court should have replaced him with another judge.

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