Does the European Court of Human Rights Reinforce the Boundaries of National Belonging in Germany? On Cultural Difference, Gender, and Violence

This paper examines the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in cases brought forward by German and non-German men to contest the German state’s measures against them to prevent violence. These men were convicted for acts of violence against women like rape, battery, trafficking, and murder. Although scholars have found that the Court has tended to vindicate the human rights of minority men in Germany (Gusy and Müller 2009), the reverse is true here. The Court has ruled in favour of German men who argued that their retrospective placement in preventive detention (nachträgliche Sicherungsverwahrung) violated their right to liberty and security. These decisions lack a discussion of violence against women as a social problem and claim that perpetrators’ right to liberty and security supersedes the state’s efforts to prevent violence. In contrast, the Court has decided in favour of Germany in the cases of Turkish and Moroccan men that contested their deportation by arguing that this measure would violate their right to family life. These decisions make reference to notions of masculinity in relation to these men’s cultural background and highlight the acts of violence against women for which they were convicted as an expression of their lack of integration in German society. This paper shows that gendered notions of cultural difference matter in the Court’s interpretation of acts of violence against women. It further argues that the ECtHR’s decisions mirror the integration debates in Germany and reinforce the boundaries of belonging to the German nation-state.