Some German journalists called for a video transmission of the court's proceedings to a spillover room, others offered to give their seats to Turkish colleagues. However all these requests were rejected by the court. Rules are rules.

Which side to take turned out not to be a question of party affiliation, interestingly enough. One MP for the conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union called on the court to reserve ten out of the 50 media seats for foreign journalists, while the Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle expressed his understanding for the Turks' demands but said he was unable to interfere with the court's independence. Sigmar Gabriel, head of the centre-left Social Democrats, accused the court of "small-mindedness".

The issue only added to simmering tensions over Mrs Merkel's lukewarm stance towards Turkey's EU membership and the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's occasional attempts to pose as the representative of Turks living in Germany.

The main reason for the court's decision not to bend the rules is that it has to stay independent of political interference; Germany is strict about this for historical reasons. But a case like this reveals that dogmatic adherence to an apolitical stance by the judiciary can be betrayed by what we might call politics-in-action, and thereby exposes both what bureaucracy is and what it should be: an institution bound by humanitarian principles. 

It needs what the British still possess, without too many rules and regulations: common sense.