The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) [official website] on Thursday unanimously upheld [judgment] a German court’s ruling allowing the preventative detention of a 28- year-old man. Daniel Ilnseher was convicted of strangling a woman to death in 1997. In 2008 he had served the 10-year sentence, as prescribed by law for juveniles, but was not released and instead kept in preventive detention. In 2013 Germany adopted legislation that allowed preventive detention for people with mental disorders deemed a risk to society after the court found previous rules unconstitutional [JURIST report]. Ilnseher took his appeal to the ECHR claiming that his detention breached the European Convention on Human Rights [text, PDF], specifically the right to liberty. The court found that Ilnseher’s mental condition allowed Germany to keep him in detention. The court did, however, award Ilnseher €12,500 as a compensatory payment, due to the unsuitable conditions in which he was kept from May 2011 through June 2013.

Countries around this world today still struggle to come to a uniform understanding of what constitutes legal, safe and appropriate forms of detention. Last week in the US a federal judge ruled that the state of Rhode Island and immigration officials violated the rights [JURIST report] of a detained citizen after the citizen was arrested without probable cause and held 24 hours after a judge had ordered her release. The day before a court in South Korea ordered the government to pay funds in compensation for its illegal detention [JURIST report] of prostitutes in the 60’s and 70’s. Also in January the long standing issue of Guantanamo Bay once again came up into the news, as a federal judge declined to intervene [JURIST report] in the release of a prisoner, who feared that he would have no chance of being removed from the prison during the Trump administration. Also last month a US appeals court ruled that a Minnesota program that keeps sex offenders confined to secure facilities after they complete their prison sentences is constitutional and necessary [JURIST report] to protect citizens from dangerous predators.