Karlsruhe - Germany took a step towards banning the radical rightwing National Democratic Party (NPD) on Monday when the nation's top court agreed to open a hearing into the case in March.
The upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, representing the country's states, agreed two years to prepare a case for banning the anti-foreigner NPD on the grounds that it was unconstitutional and wanted to overturn the country's democratic order.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative-led government and the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, have joined the Bundesrat in seeking to have the NPD outlawed.
The Karlsruhe-based Constitutional Court did not set out any reasons for deciding to hear the case.
This is the second time in 12 years that there has been attempt to prohibit the NPD.
The last attempt in 2003, led by Social Democrat chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government, failed when the court ruled that the NPD could not be banned on the grounds of the number of police and intelligence service informants who had infiltrated the party.
The court said this meant that the state played a role in influencing the NPD.
But state interior ministers insisted that the information for the case was not derived from informants.
German law stipulates that a party must pose a threat to democratic order for a ban to be put in place. The constitutional court has only banned two parties since the end of WWII - the Nazi-orientated Socialist Reich Party of Germany in 1952 and the German Communist Party four years later.
The court said it will hold three days of hearings into the NPD case on March 1-3.
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