ABSTRACT

Like the UK Germany has been combating domestic terrorism for several decades and Germany has had extensive experience in tailoring its laws to meet the challenges of security. West Germany was the target of multiple attacks mainly by a leftist terrorist organization called Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction), or RAF for short. Citations and references to Germany's constitutional structure and legal system perfectly illustrate the importance of Ernst Rabel's "functional" approach to comparative law again, that "context" matters. The State Department's 2005 World Report on Counterterrorism, the US State Department described Germany and its counterterrorism efforts as follows: German cooperation with the United States on the counterterrorism front remained strong, although sometimes limited by Germany laws and procedures. With frequent terrorist attacks, Germany began to revise its laws with a series of internal anti-terrorism measures in the 1960s and 1970s that the United States and the United Kingdom only really began considering post-2001.