Already, advertisers are being prevented from placing discriminatory adverts on city-owned hoardings
By Lucy Barkin
BERLIN, June 20 (Reuters) - Sexist advertising could disappear from the streets of Germany's capital after the parties in Berlin's ruling coalition agreed a ban on degrading or discriminatory advertising even on privately-owned advertising hoardings.
The move follows similar decisions in various districts of the city state, and could mark a departure for a city known as a party town that has long traded on an association with the licentiousness of its avant-garde 1920s.
The Social Democrat, Green and far-left Die Linke parties in the city state's government have said they intend to proceed with the measure in their coalition agreement despite objections from opposition parties who say it infringes free speech.
"The coalition will establish an expert committee to examine and prevent discriminatory advertising," the parties said in their coalition agreement from last year. Already, advertisers are being prevented from placing discriminatory adverts on city-owned hoardings.
A committee of experts will decide whether individual adverts are sexist or degrading in nature.
The Linke in one Berlin district have suggested that adverts that present women as beautiful but also as "weak, hysterical, stupid, non compos mentis or naive" or as objects of lust should be regarded as sexist, the Tagesspiegel reported.
Opposition parties have criticised the proposal, however, with Merkel's Christian Democrats saying that politics had "no right to intervene in the free advertising market", while the liberal Free Democrats worried that the measure was a constraint on freedom of expression.
Others have argued that sexist advertising is rarer today than in the past, meaning a ban is unnecessary.
But Petra Koch-Knoebel, the equality commissioner for the borough of Friedrichshain disagreed, saying that the fact that it was rarer meant people had become "sensitised" to excessive advertising.
From 2019, the city-wide government will assume the power to regulate public advertising from the boroughs with whom it currently resides, meaning the planned ban is likely to go into effect from then. (Reporting by Lucy Barkin, editing by Thomas Escritt/Jeremy Gaunt)
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