A Kidnapping in Germany

As of today, German authorities are still searching for the wife of a local bank executive. The mother-of-two was kidnapped almost a week ago. After a failed attempt at leaving the money for the blackmailers at a highway, the husband has turned to the police. Since then the kidnappers have neither made further demands nor have they released the bank executive’s wife. The case has attracted major puplic attention. Do you think if the police caught one of the kidnappers they wouldn’t apply some kind of illegal ‚interrogation technique’ to reveal the whereabouts of the woman? I don’t. The case to me proves that the torture debate, the ticking time bomb scenarios, the theoretical (and very practical) questions of rule of law and of executive powers and of positivism and of Schmittian under-siege-exemption-theories, that all these have not ceased to be the most important legal questions. Although some seem to believe they have after, thankfully, for the last couple of years there have not been major lethal terrorist attacks on Western soil.