Rev and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, founders of the Universal Peace Federation have won a major victory in the German Federal Constitutional Court. The court overturned a lower court's decision upholding an eleven year long ban preventing the couple from entering Germany or any of the other 14 nations party to the Schengen Agreement.

The case had aroused indignation around the world. For the past several years, the US State Department officially listed the ban as a "restriction of religious freedom" in its annual International Religious Freedom Report.

In June, forty international statesmen wrote an open letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel calling for the ban to be lifted. It had also been the subject of litigation for the past eleven years.

The Constitutional Court stated that it overruled the verdict by the lower court because it violated the German Constitution's provisions on Religious Liberty and the Right of Free Religious Practice. Lower courts had not thought that preventing Rev and Mrs. Moon entering Germany to meet members of the religion and its supporters was a sufficient violation of religious freedom to warrant their intervention, but the Constitutional Court strongly disagreed. It said:

“The (lower) court based its decision on evaluating genuinely religious concerns, belonging to the internal affairs of the plaintiff, which governmental institutions are not supposed to interfere with.”

The German government had tried to utilize the Schengen treaty to prevent the development of the Moons' religion. The court also found that the government's insistence that a visit by the Moons would threaten national security was spurious.

A similar ban on Moon visiting London was lifted a year ago.

Mr. James Flynn, Secretary-General of the UPF in the United States said today: “This welcome decision is just the latest sign that a dramatic global reappraisal of Rev and Mrs. Moon's life and work is underway. A series of highest court decisions in Europe has vindicated them, and more and more, the value of the work they are doing to uphold the family, bring reconciliation between religions and races, and so much else is being understood and recognized"