Justice & Law Quote by Otto Schily

The sentence is a political tightrope act: it grants the public the comfort of toughness while quietly insisting the state keep its hands off the panic button. Schily starts by validating the most combustible premise in immigration debates - that there are "dangerous people" among those facing deportation - and he does it in the language of administrative common sense ("can make sense"). That opening is a pressure valve. It tells anxious voters and security agencies: you are not being naive; precaution is allowed.

Then comes the real message, tucked inside the procedural caveats. "At least until a final decision is reached" frames detention as a temporary tool, not a shadow sentence. The subtext is an old European lesson: when governments treat suspicion as a category of person, "temporary" becomes permanent by inertia. Schily's pivot to "must always" is deliberate, almost parental. He is drawing a hard line around executive power: detention is acceptable only if it expires, and only if judges can interrogate it.

Context matters: Schily, a German interior minister in the post-9/11 years, spoke from a system haunted by what happens when policing outruns law. The phrasing tries to reconcile two constituencies that rarely share oxygen: the security state that wants speed and discretion, and a constitutional culture that treats deprivation of liberty as the most dangerous government habit. It's not sentimental about migrants; it's skeptical about unchecked authority. The target isn't just "dangerous people". It's the temptation to let fear rewrite due process.