The threat of international terrorism has led to new schools of thought about security throughout the entire world. In their wake, national legislators and international organisations have introduced or promoted legal grounds for preventive detention that are specifically tailored to persons suspected of terrorism [1]. With regard to Germany, various changes to administrative and criminal detention regimes have been contemplated in legal policy debates since the September 11 attacks. While efforts to further expand the respective coercive powers under administrative law stalled in 2005, new provisions facilitating the detention of potential terrorists have been enacted in substantive and procedural criminal law [2]. The principal reason for this development can be traced back to the incoherent standards applied to administrative and criminal detention by the German Constitutional Court (GCC) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

The distinction between administrative and crimi ...