After the then 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik placed a car bomb outside the office of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, he proceeded to the nearby island of Utøya armed with a hunting rifle and a pistol. There, over the course of an hour in the early evening of 22 July 2011, he shot at the mainly young participants at a summer camp of the ruling Labour Party. Shortly beforehand, he had sent an Englishlanguage manifesto with the title "2083: A European Declaration of Independence" to roughly a thousand email addresses. In the 1,500page screed, which Breivik had patched together from various ideologies and in parts simply copied from the internet, he sets out the abstruse motives for his attack and disseminates a world-view that is every bit as self-contradictory as it is radical. 1 On 16 April 2012 Breivik's trial began before the district court in Oslo. He was charged with terrorism and multiple counts of premeditated murder. From the very outset, the question of Breivik's criminal liability was at issue. While forensic psychiatric assessments came to different conclusions about Breivik's mental condition, 2 the prosecutor pleaded for criminal insanity and called for the committal of the assassin to a secure psychiatric hospital. By contrast, the defence sought a finding of sanity for their client. Breivik saw himself as a "political activist" and wanted to be treated as such before the court. He repeatedly denied being insane, which he described as "a fate worse than death". 3 At the start of the trial, Breivik confessed to having killed 77 people, but declared himself not guilty and appealed to "emergency law". 4 He argued that he, as a "Knight Templar" and "liberator of mankind", had to defend Europe against Islamic infiltration and Norway against 160 D. Ziegler et al. (eds.

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