The "self-censorship" is done out of respect for the spirit of the law.
You're talking about "Sicherungsverwahrung", which has indeed that effect, but a regular life sentence without Sicherungsverwahrung can also be indefinitely long, until the person dies.
There are also perodical checks whether the prisoner is still a danger to society or whether he can be released, but it is possible to stay in regular prison without Sicherungsverwahrung forever.
Or fear of being dropped by the search engines?
Life sentence is 20 years, (a bit less if you show remorse). Unless you are deemed criminally insane then you won't come out maybe ever.
Also in the EU the name of criminals are usually not printed or published in any other way unless it's a big thing like murder of multiple people or massive fraud.
Tabloids sometimes do print the names but usually only with the first letter of their last name
That is not true at all.
Criminal trials are public and people are fully named in the media in many countries unless there is a specific court order against it (which I have never heard off except for minors).
(Germany is not the EU)
I don't think naming people online is a good idea any more.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prisoners_with_whole-l...
The UK has had issues about this and has had to find a way to adapt: Whole-life ordesr have to be reviewed after some time in order to give a chance of release (at least on paper).
For the same reason, e.g. in France life sentences come with a maximum of 30 years before becoming eligible for parole. What they do is then that they simply keep denying parole for prisoners they want to keep inside.
That's the UK context, but most of Europe seems to operate similarly.
Justice system in Europe is not a business, like it is in US, or a way to inflict a punishment, it is a rehabilitation process: if you prove you have changed, you can benefit from reduced sentences, furlough for good behavior and/or early releases.
If you haven't, you stay in jail.
Think about the U.S. system where people can be taken to custody for murder but can bail out, is that better in your opinion?
In Italy, for example, to keep mob affiliates in jail in solitary confinement, so they can't speak with the outside, they had to make a specific law, otherwise it would not be possible within the Italian prison system.
Humans have a strong natural instinct towards justice — when soneone wrongs us, we want to take revenge. In a state of nature this of course leads to endless and bloody feuds, so at some point it became more sensible to devolve the job of taking revenge to some kind of king or government, to ensure that revenge is taken exactly once instead of becoming a never-ending cycle.
This worked pretty well for thousands of years, but in the last century or so it has been falling apart. Soft-headed Government types have started to believe that the actual purpose of the justice system is rehabilitation, not justice, and as a result justice is rarely if ever served. Ask victims of crime if the sentence given to the perp is anywhere near what they’d choose, and they’ll say no. And then, the sentence that is given rarely gets carried out, like this scumbag who was sentenced to life and released just twenty years later.
The right to revenge is one of the most important human rights of all, and it is utterly neglected in western societies these days. A proper justice system would have a lot more crooks dying in jail and a lot less crime being committed.
Not in Europe, since "Dei delitti e delle pene" (On Crimes and Punishments ) from Cesare Beccaria.
It was 1764, we were already aware of that.
Justice is not a way to inflict punishment, the sentence, as Beccaria put it "should be in degree to the severity of the crime" and should work as deterrent, not as retribution (which is usually the case in US especially the death penalty, that have the purpose of giving "an eye for an eye" to the victim's family).
> Humans have a strong natural instinct towards justice
No, they don't.
Homō hominī lupus, men are very social animals, it doesn't mean they lean naturally towards justice, they just defend their communities against other communities.
> This worked pretty well for thousands of years
It didn't actually.
That's why we constantly reformed our justice system.
Think about the code of Ammurabi, does this work in your opinion?
"If the wife of a man has been caught lying with another man, they shall bind them and throw them into the waters. If the owner of the wife would save his wife then in turn the king could save his servant."
It never really worked, especially for the regular folks, still today has a lot of flaws let alone thousands of years ago. In Italy it was legal to kill the wife that cheated (but not the husband who did the same), it was called "honor killing" and it was abolished only in 1981.
So, no.
> The right to revenge is one of the most important human rights of all
It is its greatest fault indeed.
And it is what makes USA a country where the risk of being killed by a stranger is 10 times higher than in Italy (5.63/100,000 vs 0.55/100.000), it is higher than many third world countries or countries that are at war like Sudan, Kenya, Niger, Libya, Syria or Iran.
This probably has its roots in the past, with Nazi lynchings were justice was just skipped and people thought they had to carry out a sentence themselves.
Although I understand the emotional conflict that arises from situations like these, it gives me actually confidence in the justice system of the nation I currently live in: if they even defend the rights of a murderer, this indicates they will also take the privacy of everybody else seriously.
Edit: I also don’t feel I need to know whether e.g. my neighbour served a prison sentence — the goal of german prisons is rehabilitation and they are actually not bad at that.
He murdered people on a yacht - maybe he's rich? At least an alternative explanation for why his case was honoured by the highest court.
Suing in Europe is pricey and time-consuming, so I would not say your privacy would be taken seriously "by default" so to say.
This murderer will still be under supervision until they die, will have particular restrictions about how they live their life, and will be recalled to a prison for almost any minor offence. However the parole board will have made a decision that they are unlikely to offend again and so it is better for society, the taxpayer (and the individual) to allow them to live outside of the prison walls,
This strikes me as self-censorship.
As an aside, it's also interesting that a person sentenced to life for murdering two people in 1982 was freed in 2002...