Prague's city hall has decided to file a complaint against a court ruling that overturned the municipal ban of a neo-Nazi march through Prague's historic Jewish quarter, city spokesman Jiri Wolf said Wednesday.

"The reasons that are presented in the ruling are not acceptable to us," Wolf told Deutsche Presse-Agentur. The march was planned for the 69th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom.

The municipality earlier this month forbade the organizer of the demonstration - a known supporter of the Czech Republic neo-Nazi movement - from continuing with the plans for the march. The Prague Municipal Court on Friday then canceled the city's ban.

When the march, set for November 10, was registered at the city hall in August, the man registering it said its purpose was to protest Czech participation in the Iraq war.

However, extremism experts and Jewish leaders subsequently warned that the march announcement on neo-Nazi web sites and related online discussions suggested otherwise.

One, for example, invited protesters to bring flags in Third Reich colours of black, white and red. "It is a provocation ... Why would anyone who wishes to protest war walk twice around the synagogues?"

Prague Jewish Community president Frantisek Banyai told DPA. "It is a message for the Jewish community."

Giving false grounds for the protest has complicated the city's efforts to ban it as such a move circumvents the relevant law. The Czech legislation that safeguards the constitutional freedom of assembly only allows for the banning of gatherings whose "announced purpose" is to incite racial intolerance and hatred against a group of people or events already underway.

The law does not give the city "an authority to investigate whether the announced purpose of the gathering is or is not fictional," the judge wrote in the ruling the city is to fight.

The city's Jewish Community now plans to hold a religious gathering by one of the synagogues in the city's historic Jewish quarter on November 10 to commemorate the victims of Kristallnacht, Banyai said.

Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, so called because of the many shattered windows of Jewish businesses took place on November 10, 1938, and marked the beginning of open persecution of Germany's Jewish population by the Nazis.

On Tuesday the Paris-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre urged Czech President Vaclav Klaus to stop the neo-Nazi march. Klaus, who does not have an authority to ban the march, has urged "responsible authorities to not allow such a politically and morally unacceptable event, which disgraces the memory of Nazi crime victims," his spokesman Petr Hajek said in a statement.

Copyright Ha'aretz News 2007