The liberal dilemma when a suspended killer strikes

THE CANAL PARADE in Amsterdam on Saturday was the headline event of WorldPride, a fortnight of festivals running through the Dutch capital. Hundreds of thousands lined the quays. Eighty festooned boats drifted past. The Dutch prime minister, Mr Jetten, an openly gay man who receives daily threats because of his sexual orientation, sailed in for the first time a sitting premier has. Techno music pumped from speakers; police boats cruised the canals and a helicopter hovered above. It was, in other words, a protest dressed as a party. The Berlin attack of the previous week was unmistakably in the background.

On July 25th a van was driven into pedestrians at Berlin's Christopher Street Day, killing one woman and injuring 29. The suspect, Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen with Lebanese roots, was shot dead by police the following afternoon after a 24-hour manhunt. What makes the attack disquieting is not merely the violence, which is ghastly enough. It is the institutional failure that preceded it. Mr Ballout had been convicted in May of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state. He had tried to join the so-called Islamic State in Syria, was arrested in Lebanon, deported back to Germany, and found guilty by a Berlin court. His sentence of 22 months was then suspended. He was free to kill.

The reason is not hard to see. Germany's juvenile criminal law applies to offenders aged 14 to 17, and can extend to those aged 18 to 20 if they show "developmental delays". Because Mr Ballout was 20 when he committed the acts of which he was convicted, the court applied juvenile law even though he was 21 at the time of sentencing. Juvenile courts in Germany prioritise education over incarceration. The system is not designed to be punitive. It is designed on the premise that a young offender can still change for the better, a view backed by neuroscience on the late maturation of impulse-control areas of the brain. Judges have considerable discretion, and can impose suspended sentences with a period of "preliminary probation" during which the offender is monitored and ordered to attend a deradicalisation programme.

To be sure, this is not a uniquely German failing. Liberal democracies everywhere face the same tension. Rehabilitation is a genuine ideal, and recidivism rates among juveniles sentenced under Germany's system are no higher than for those processed under adult law. Harder penalties do not necessarily make societies safer. The juvenile court's impulse-to believe a 20-year-old can reform rather than condemn him for a quarter of a century-is consistent with the values that distinguish liberal states from authoritarian ones.

The deeper problem is that those values are not being matched by institutional rigour. Mr Ballout was ordered to attend a deradicalisation programme run by the Violence Prevention Network, a Berlin-based group that works with people at risk from right-wing and Islamist extremism. Staff evaluated him twice. They concluded he was not a candidate for the programme because his cooperation appeared fake. "He gave the answers they wanted to hear," said Cornelia Lotthammer, the group's communications director. A third and final evaluation was scheduled for the Monday after the attack. The system had identified the problem. It was not structured to act on it.

That is the failure. Not that Germany has a rehabilitation programme, but that the outputs of that programme were not connected to enforcement. The deradicalisation staff had concluded he was not suitable for the programme. The court had given him a suspended sentence. The police officers monitoring him concluded he was behaving unobtrusively. No single agency held the power-or the incentive-to ask the harder question: what happens if he is not reforming, but merely hiding?

The politics will move faster than the evidence. Germany's interior minister, Mr Dobrindt, called the suspended sentence "incomprehensible". The far-right AfD called the attack a "total failure of security policy". The chancellor, Mr Merz, has asked the interior ministry to review monitoring rules. A ban on suspended sentences for terrorism convictions is being debated. It is tempting to think that removing judicial discretion will fix the problem. In practice, it will not. The system does not need more rigid penalties. It needs better information flows between courts, probation, intelligence and the civil-society organisations that sit closest to the ground.

Amsterdam's response offers a different model. The Dutch government is spending €35m on safety cooperation with police and large cities, as Mr Jetten announced from his Pride boat. Mayor Femke Halsema said extra security measures would be deployed that visitors would "hopefully notice as little as possible". The aim, as one organiser put it, is simple: "The aim of terrorism is to spread fear, and we must not give in to that". That is the right instinct. A society that responds to terrorist violence by shrinking the spaces where people gather freely has already surrendered.

But defiance alone is not enough. The Amsterdam boat parade is a spectacle of inclusion. The Berlin court is a case study in institutional silos. Both are liberal impulses. One protects the community by making it visible. The other, despite its humane intentions, left a known risk walking free because nobody was authorised to connect the dots.

The first task for Germany is not to abolish juvenile law. It is to close the gap between the organisations that can see a threat and the authorities that can act on it. If a deradicalisation programme flags a participant as insincere, the probation court should be required to reconsider. If intelligence suggests a violation of weapons laws, the dismissal of a search after finding only a toy gun should not end the enquiry. The mechanics of coordination are dull. They are also the difference between a system that works and one that produces a dead woman in the Tiergarten.

Better to start now, before the politics demand a spectacle of their own.