Rescue torture

As a ticking time bomb scenario is defined as the use of torture by a public official in the context of security , in order to force a person to a statement by a threatened legal interest to be protected.

In German-speaking countries, the name became known in the discussion about the kidnapping of eleven-year-old Jakob von Metzler in Frankfurt am Main . The then Vice-President of the Frankfurt Police, Wolfgang Daschner , had ordered the kidnapper Magnus Gäfgen to be threatened with torture in order to find out the victim's whereabouts. The criminal law scholar Reinhard Merkel spoke in this context of rescue torture and demanded impunity for police officers in similar situations, which resulted in a heated debate on the subject. Significant questions, which were also dealt with in the Daschner trial , were whether the rescue torture was exempt from punishment and whether torture used as a violation of human dignity could lead to the criminal proceedings being terminated.

The competent regional court argued, referring to the inviolability of human dignity , that no criminal offense legitimized the use of torture, but rather could not be justified under any circumstances by the threat of danger or offense. The reasons for the judgment met with rejection from some lawyers. The phrase was a candidate for the bad word of 2004.

The moral question of the permissibility of rescue torture (not yet known at the time) was raised earlier. For example, the later Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, Ernst Albrecht, took the following view in 1976: If a group of people is determined to use weapons of mass destruction within the shortest possible time and this project can only be thwarted if the state organs can find out the whereabouts of these people, "it may be morally necessary to force this information from a member of this group of people through torture, provided that this would really be the only way to prevent a nameless crime. "

See also

• Enemy criminal law

literature

• Frank Meier: Is the prohibition of torture absolute? Ethical problems of police coercive measures between respect and protection of human dignity. Mentis, Münster 2016 (also dissertation at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf 2015), ISBN 978-3-95743-043-4 .
• Georg Wagenländer: On the criminal law assessment of rescue torture (= writings on criminal law. H. 173). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-428-12056-6 (also: Hamburg, Bucerius Law School, Diss., 2005).
• Rainer Trapp: Torture or self-inflicted rescue survey? Mentis, Paderborn 2006, ISBN 3-89785-563-1 .
• Rolf Dietrich Herzberg : Torture and Human Dignity. In: Juristentung (JZ). 2005, pp. 321-328.
• Ernst Benda : Those who are strong do not torture. In: The world . July 26, 2004. Online at Welt-Online , last accessed November 12, 2011.

Web links

• Panel discussion “May the state torture?” With Winfried Brugger and Bernhard Schlink, HFR 4/2002
• Winfried Brugger: "Restriction of the absolute prohibition of torture in the case of rescue torture?", From Politics and Contemporary History Issue 36 2006
• Interview "Self-defense in favor of the child" with Reinhard Merkel, Deutschlandradio Kultur, June 30, 2008

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Steffen Waadt: Police fatal shot and so-called rescue torture in comparison. GRIN, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-640-96629-5 , p. 11.
2. ↑ Heinrich Götz: The judgment against Daschner in the light of the value system of the Basic Law , NJW 2005, 953 (957). The legality of rescue torture affirming, for example, Kristian Kühl : Criminal Law General Part , 7th edition 2012, p. 191 ff.
3. ↑ Ernst Albrecht: The state - idea and reality. Basic features of a state philosophy. Seewald, Stuttgart 1976, p. 174.