ABSTRACT
German authorities have sincerely tried to transpose the precepts of the Convention, as interpreted by the Strasbourg Court, accurately into German law. The Administrative Court remarked that under German law, in difference to the law of many other European States, acts in preparation of the future commission of a crime were usually not as such qualified as crimes. The Strasbourg Court furthermore determined that Article 7 European Court of Human Rights was also violated because the Sicherungsverwahrung type of preventive detention amounted to a penalty in the sense of that provision. The Strasbourg Court underlined that there was no substantial difference between the executions of a prison sentence and that of a preventive detention order. The Federal Constitutional Court readily took up the Strasbourg initiative and pushed it further in a good-faith effort to bring that system in line with the Convention, and the German legislature joined in.
