The “war against terror” remains one of the most difficult challenges for criminal law, as it takes the rule of law to its constitutional limits. Eleven years after 9/11, we see that these events have led to modifications of the general structure of security laws worldwide and also in Germany. National laws have not only been extended to address modern phenotypes of terrorism and the financing of terrorism but have also been expanded to catch foreign and international organizations. Fighting terrorism can only be successful with global cooperation. The papers in this special issue were presented at the International Forum on Crime and Criminal Law in the Global Era in Beijing, and should thus be seen as part of the German-Chinese dialogue on criminal matters. As the question of how German legislation and jurisprudence react to the challenges connected to the fight against international terrorism stretch far beyond this dialogue, a special issue of the German Law Journal seems to be the perfect forum to address a wider global audience.

The shock was great when a car bomb shook the Norwegian capital of Oslo on 22 July 2011 not only destroying government buildings, but also taking eight people to their deaths. However, this was only the prelude to the horrors that unfolded almost thirty kilometers away. There, on the resort island of Utøya, sixty-nine participants of a Young Socialists summer camp were shot dead. Based on our current understanding of events, all these acts can be attributed to one single person who believed himself to be fighting an ideological battle against the supposed evil. Before the attacks, the perpetrator put his convictions into writing and sent many pages around the world via the Internet.

Going after terrorists, often means “fighting the unknown”. The so-called “new threat” cannot be tracked back to known terrorists plotting against known government officials within national boundaries. The need for early investigation is clear, nothing more urgent than to forestall further terrorist actions. Today's sleeper can be tomorrow's terrorist. Hence, the argument herein is that new developments remain as consequent continuation perfecting well-known terrorist strategies and techniques. Instead of predating criminal responsibility the unknown needs to be identified. In refusing such identification current criminal law turns into a soft law reflecting actual social needs by preventing a future wrong. Current German criminal law on terrorism overextends appropriate borders in criminalizing chains of preparations. Punishment is carried out for “thinking different” by way of pre-crime, just symbolizing the wrong. The paper argues that even if criminal responsibility is predated in order to identify the unknown, it has to base on behavior, which can be understood as disorder outside the offender's interim sphere to qualify as criminal wrong. This applies to suspected terrorists and also to all other suspects of crime.

The international context plays a role in the fight against terrorism that is not to be underestimated. On the one hand, international law poses legal obligations that lead and limit the national legislator in his actions. On the other hand, it has become clear that terrorism nowadays is an international problem that concerns not only individual states but the whole international community. The states have recognized that in order to counter the terrorist threat, an approach only on the national level cannot suffice. As a result, the fight against terrorism has shifted increasingly to the international and supranational level. For Germany the European influence is of particular importance. Therefore, the assessment of the European Commission regarding the handling of terrorist threats gains relevance:

During the last few decades scholars have discussed various different scenarios of modern terrorism. One of these scenarios –– Islamic motivated terrorism –– came to light with the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Another scenario discussed involves terrorist attacks against the natural environment as part of so-called “eco-terrorism”. These attacks are either carried out using traditional weapons or the often-discussed “bioterrorism”, where biological weapons are manufactured and misused by terrorists.

The right to resistance against state power is very often characterized by actions against an existing legal order that is perceived as being unjust and therefore both – illegitimate and illegal. Terrorism, on the other hand, is often defined as politically motivated violence that is prosecuted by state power according to the law and although the terrorist views his actions as being justified by the perceived illegitimacy of state power, the state by itself is not willing to accept such a point of view – henceforth the prosecution. Therefore we can often find situations where both sides claim legitimacy and legality, mutually excluding each other's positions. This situation is only one of many that epitomize and exemplifies the more common problem of paradox in law: any society that aims at harmonizing conflicts through law will find itself in the not so comfortable position that the basic principle of justice – the quest for treating similar things alike – inevitably leads to cases where we have to face a direct conflict of laws. Either one law is just and therefore ought to apply, or the other, but we will not be able to apply both at the same time, since they may turn out conflicting results.

The determination of the tax residence of companies – as a fundamental issue of (international) tax law – emerged between the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century. This emerged as an issue in cases where companies which were found to have their place of management, in the sense of a decision-making centre, in the United Kingdom (UK), carried out all their business activity, in terms of production and commercialization, in another country. At a time when the UK was establishing its tax system earlier than other countries, the tax courts of this country began to develop the “central management and control test” as a test for establishing companies' tax residence in these situations and to consider the companies at stake as tax residents in the UK on the ground that their decision-making centre was located there. Such decisions appeared to have been driven by an interest to prevent companies carrying out their business abroad from escaping UK taxation on their worldwide income, and thus to have been motivated by a specific anti-avoidance purpose. Nonetheless, the “central management and control” test formed the basis of the “place of effective management” test which, under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Model for bilateral conventions against double taxation, is currently adopted as a tiebreaker rule, i.e. as a criteria for allocating the tax residence of companies in cases where both contracting

On Thursday 19th of July 2012, just prior to the parliamentary summer holidays, the Deutscher Bundestag (German Parliament) passed a resolution based on a rather irritating motivation. The parliament intended to guarantee that “Jewish and Muslim religious life will be further possible in Germany.” The resolution itself consisted in only one sentence: The German Government is requested to provide until fall 2012 – in due consideration of the constitutionally protected legal positions of the well-being of the child, the right to bodily integrity, the right to religious freedom and the parental rights in education – draft legislation in order to safeguard that professionally performed male circumcision, without unnecessary pain, is generally lawful under German law. What had happened to provoke such extraordinary political action in defense of religious freedom? The resolution responds directly to a decision of the Landgericht (Court of Appeal) Cologne from 7 May 2012 which declared that male circumcision in children amounts to criminal battery, even if performed lege artis and with the consent of the parents unless there is a medical indication for the procedure. In doing so, the court followed a restrictive position within the German criminal law literature that has been advocating the criminalization of male