Head of project: Johanna Bücker Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) authorizes Member States to suspend human rights in time of war or other public emergencies. This derogation provision has been used several times, its invocation and use differing widely over time. Since 2015, for example, derogations have been invoked in response to terrorism, military aggression, an attempted coup d’état, a global pandemic, an energy shortage, and a natural disaster.
Head of project: Samuel Hartwig The last few years have seen a disquieting new trend emerge in global Islamist terrorism. The primary threat to Western societies used to be posed by terrorists entering Western countries from abroad. But nowadays citizens of Western countries also travel in the opposite direction to participate in terrorist campaigns in foreign countries.
Heads of project: Philipp-Alexander Hirsch, Svenja Schwartz, Alexander Heinze Can a person be blamed for turning a blind eye to the circumstances of his or her conduct? From a criminal law perspective, the concept of “willful ignorance” (“willful blindness” or “conscious avoidance”) exists – in varying forms and terms – in different jurisdictions.
Head of project: Johanna Rinceanu The past five years have posed new challenges for Europe and the entire world: A rapid spread of digital violence and online “hate speech”, including image-based harassment, fake news, disinformation, propaganda, racism and xenophobia have become a steadily growing social problem fueled by migration crises, political upheavals, a fast rise of populism, the Corona pandemic, and the war in Ukraine.
Head of project: Eduardo Vandré Oliveira Lema Garcia The project aims to justify adjudication contra legem. It demonstrates the lack of congruence between common sense about how judges decide and the actual practice that there are decisions that deviate from the traditional or consensual conception about the way the norm should be understood when constrained by semantics. Decisions contra legem, therefore, if not inevitable, are a reality in all judicial systems.
Head of project: Benjamin Vogel Confronted with transnational terrorism and other forms of organised crime that elude the territorial borders of nation states, law enforcement authorities in many countries are increasingly turning to the private sector to tackle illicit financial flows. While banks and other financial institutions have been tasked for some decades with extensive preventive duties as well as obligations to report suspicious transactions to the authorities, doubts persist as to whether these efforts are successful or whether they are even worth the effort.
Heads of project: Matthew Fox, Steven E. Clayman The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to have their guilt decided by an impartial jury. The complication to this right is that the information used to assess impartiality must be requested from prospective jurors themselves during voir dire.
Head of project: Johannes Weigel The criminalization of inadvertent negligence has long been deliberated in German criminal law scholarship, although the debate seems largely to have come to a standstill in recent decades. Today, most scholars defend the existing criminalization by means of a (purely) norm-based allocation of blame.
Head of project: Thomas Wahl The surrender of criminal suspects who flee to foreign countries has sparked controversy for centuries. Relevant extradition law shows not only criminal law’s territorial limits, but the dissolution of tension between security through effective cross-border enforcement and protecting individual rights.
Heads of project: Philipp-Alexander Hirsch, Patrick Joseph Siegle The project examines the human rights guarantees of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, and the fundamental rights of the German Grundgesetz as shaped by the respective case law to determine the extent to which they grant victims of crime subjective rights to punishment of the offender.
Head of project: Florian Slogsnat What is the relationship between private and state conflict management? The aim of this project is to examine this relationship in the context of section 34 German Criminal Code (necessity as a justification, rechtfertigender Notstand). According to this provision, an act is justified if it is committed in order to defend a higher-ranking protected legal interest.
Head of project: Johannes Buchheim This project seeks to analyze and assess the constitutional and practical possibilities and limits of legal instruments countering the spreading of “fake news,” especially in the digital realm. In the past decade, the phenomenon of “fake news”— severely exacerbated by the digital media revolution—has raised persistent and heightened concerns throughout liberal democracies.