Vielsprachige Normenverbindlichkeit im Europäischen Strafrecht

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Abstract May anyone be punished for violating a multilingual norm of European Union law, if the norm‘s true meaning cannot be derived from a language version one understands? Despite the claims of legal theory that all language versions reflect a European norm‘s true content in an equally authentic way, these language versions differ in practice. Then one language version must take precedence over another. Even a law-abiding individual can easily violate such a norm, when a language version does not reflect the norm’s true content. The principles of legality and guilt, which are fundamental to criminal justice, collide with the need for applying norms uniformly across Europe and for treating all language versions equally. The thesis shows how to protect the individual from such inter-lingual legal uncertainty without abandoning these established standards for interpretating EU law.