On 12 April 2010, Abdul Hanan filed a criminal complaint with Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutor and requested access to the investigation file. Two of his sons had died in an airstrike in Afghanistan the previous September. Four days after the complaint, the investigation was discontinued. He had not yet been heard, and his lawyer had not received access to the file.^[1]

There is an obvious place to end that opening: a bereaved father approaches a distant state, and the door shuts. But that would leave out the rest of his case. His later submissions were considered. German courts examined his challenge. Eventually, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a Grand Chamber judgment. The difficult question is not whether a door existed, but what passing through it entitled him to ask.

The answer was not an order to prosecute. In 2021, the European court found no violation of Germany’s procedural obligation to investigate under Article 2 of the Convention. An honest account must keep that outcome visible, rather than treating an unwelcome result as an interruption to its preferred story.^[1][2]

A multinational operation, a particular responsibility

The strike took place near Kunduz on 4 September 2009. Two hijacked fuel tankers had become stranded on a river sandbank. A German commander ordered an airstrike, carried out by US aircraft. People including civilians were killed; Hanan’s sons were among them. Estimates of the overall casualties and their composition differed. This essay does not turn one disputed total into a settled fact.^[1][2]

Several institutional names surround the event. The International Security Assistance Force was a UN-mandated multinational force, led by NATO from 2003. Authorization by the UN did not make it a UN force. Multinational participation did not make the particular order an act with no identifiable person behind it.^[3]

Readers need not memorize the entire command structure. They do need to distinguish authorization of a mission, organization of an operation, issuance of an order, and power to investigate a soldier. Calling all four ‘the international community’ sounds expansive. For someone seeking an answer, it can make the responsible address disappear.

Hanan’s case raised a problem of distance. The deaths occurred in Afghanistan; the commander belonged to the German military; the proceedings took place in Germany. Could the state’s investigative responsibility simply stop at its border? Conversely, would opening a domestic inquiry make every death anywhere in the world subject to the same Convention obligation?

The court adopted neither shortcut. It relied on a combination of special features: Germany’s international-law duty concerning potential war crimes, its domestic investigative obligations, and the troop arrangements reserving criminal and disciplinary jurisdiction over German personnel to Germany. Afghan authorities could not themselves prosecute the German officers.^[1]

That combination supplied the jurisdictional link for the procedural obligation in this case. It was not a general rule that the mere opening of any investigation creates Convention jurisdiction over every overseas death. Nor did it settle the underlying strike’s attribution or all questions of substantive responsibility.

Exclusive jurisdiction is usually described from the state’s side: other authorities may not prosecute our personnel. From a family’s side, it also identifies the place where a demand must be addressed. If the arrangements direct the question principally to you, geographical distance cannot, by itself, be the whole answer.

A hearing is not a promised verdict

The Federal Public Prosecutor formally opened the criminal investigation in March 2010 and discontinued it in April. A central issue was the commander’s state of knowledge: the prosecution did not find grounds for the required criminal responsibility, including the relevant mental element. That is an account of the prosecutor’s conclusion. It is not a statement that no civilians were present.^[1][2]

Hanan pursued domestic remedies. The Federal Constitutional Court’s decision of 19 May 2015 found no violation of the relevant constitutional rights; its explanatory press release appeared in June. The European proceedings followed.^[4]

These were not interchangeable institutions. Strasbourg was not another German prosecutor, responsible for issuing each investigative instruction anew. Its task was to assess compliance with the Convention. An effective investigation is an obligation to undertake adequate work, not a guarantee of prosecution, conviction, or acceptance of every request made by a complainant.

That distinction can sound painfully remote from a parent’s loss. Why should someone who has lost children not be able to insist on a particular witness or investigative step? Yet an entitlement to investigation cannot mean an entitlement to prescribe the finding. Otherwise, the process would merely exchange one predetermined answer for another.

The practical questions were less grand, and more demanding. Could investigators reach the site safely? What evidence existed independently of the commander’s account? Had recordings been preserved? Could the civilian prosecutor’s later work make good deficiencies at the start? These details determine whether ‘finding out what happened’ describes a real undertaking or a reassuring phrase.

The European court did not pronounce the initial handling flawless. It said the commander should not have participated in investigative steps on 4–5 September concerning his own responsibility. It also examined the battlefield constraints, subsequent civilian investigation, and other material, including audio and thermal-imaging recordings. It did not treat an initial defect as automatically fatal, or armed conflict as an exemption from standards.^[1]

The four days in April remained part of that examination. Discontinuing the investigation without first hearing Hanan or admitting his lawyer to the file was initially problematic. But the court also considered the later treatment of his submissions, the possibility of reopening on relevant new material, and the actual handling of file access. It assessed the sequence rather than freezing it at its least satisfactory moment.^[1]

A reader may disagree with the weight the court gave those later steps. Such disagreement should address the decision it actually made. ‘Nobody ever considered his material’ and ‘the consideration remained insufficient’ are different criticisms. The first erases part of his history; the second leaves room to examine what further work was needed.

One procedural detail is especially easy to misreport. The complaint about the independence of the investigation conducted in Germany was rejected as manifestly ill-founded. The court left open the question of exhaustion of domestic remedies for that complaint. It would be wrong to say that this part failed simply because Hanan had omitted a required domestic step.^[1]

What the judgment cannot stand in for

On 16 February 2021, the Grand Chamber unanimously found no violation of Article 2’s procedural limb in the complaint examined on its merits. It did not thereby rule that the strike itself complied with Article 2’s substantive requirements. Nor did it finish the separate analysis of attribution of the underlying military act.^[1][2]

These limits do not soften the deaths. They stop a judgment about one obligation from swallowing every other question. ‘The investigation met the Convention standard’ cannot simply become ‘the airstrike was right,’ still less ‘the family’s loss has been repaired.’ Each proposition requires a different argument.

German public institutions were not speaking with a single voice either. The Bundestag’s official account of its 2011 inquiry records sharply different political assessments. Coalition and opposition positions differed over the information available, breaches of engagement rules, errors of judgment, and political responsibility. That parliamentary history cannot honestly be reduced to a unanimous certificate of approval.^[5]

Parliamentary inquiry, criminal investigation, and human-rights review have related but distinct work to do. A breach of operational rules does not answer every question of criminal liability. A decision against prosecution does not settle political accountability. A finding that an investigation was effective does not retrospectively endorse every operational choice. One overall score would conceal the responsibilities rather than clarify them.

For the family, the distinctions may offer little consolation. Being heard is not the same as obtaining a guilty verdict. A procedurally adequate inquiry cannot return the children. Acknowledging that a route existed should never become a demand that the bereaved treat their loss as resolved.

The converse matters too. A route does not count as review only when the applicant wins. Its value includes the admission of material, the examination of objections, and the requirement to give reasons for refusing a demand. Those commitments can matter even when the final answer remains adverse. Otherwise, what we celebrate is not scrutiny but agreement with our own preferred conclusion.

The case therefore leaves a tension, not a slogan. Multinational action must not become action for which nobody answers. But that does not justify assigning every death to an identical legal wrong by an identical actor. Secrecy cannot abolish the question; neither can every operational record be assumed fit for unconditional publication. The difficult work begins where these claims have to be considered together.

This reading stops at the 2021 judgment. It does not purport to close every later controversy or other route of redress. Hanan, as the father of children killed far from Germany, made that distant operation the subject of a legal demand that had to be answered. The answer did not give him what he sought. The night did not become less terrible. We can still ask how an institution might explain its reasons more fully, and make its entrance more real for the next person who comes to it.