The listing that landed on the calendar of Germany’s Federal Court of Justice is narrower than the headlines that followed it. On 11 January 2027, the 6th Criminal Senate is scheduled to sit at 11 a.m. in the borrowed plenary hall of the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig to hear a Revision — an appeal confined to points of law — against the October 2024 acquittal of Christian Brueckner, also named in German reporting as Christian B., on five alleged Sєxual offences said to have occurred in Portugal between 2000 and 2017. The court has reserved 14 January if a separate session is needed to deliver a decision. The case reference is 6 StR 173/25.

That is the legal fact. It is not an indictment for the disappearance of Madeleine McCann from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz on 3 May 2007, it is not a murder trial, and it is not yet a retrial of the five counts on which a Braunschweig regional court already returned not-guilty verdicts. German prosecutors have publicly treated Brueckner as the prime suspect in Madeleine’s vanishing and have said they believe he abducted and killed the child, while also conceding that the kind of hard evidence a courtroom requires has remained elusive. He has always denied any role. There is still no McCann charge in Germany, Portugal, or Britain.

The presumption of innocence applies to that investigation and to the five counts under review. What prosecutors and co-plaintiffs asked the highest ordinary criminal court to examine is whether the trial bench mishandled evidence, discarded witnesses too quickly, failed to weigh circumstantial proof as a whole, and whether the presiding judge’s approach was legally flawed. Those are allegations in appeal papers, not findings. A Revision can end with the acquittal standing, with a correction of law that still leaves the result intact, or with the judgment set aside and the file sent back for a new trial before a different chamber — Göttingen has been mentioned by prosecutors as a preferred venue if that happens. Until the Senate rules, Brueckner is a free man on the acquitted counts.

He finished a separate 2019 Braunschweig sentence for the 2005 rape of an American woman at the same Algarve resort complex in September 2025 and has lived since then under supervision that has included electronic monitoring, reporting duties, residence conditions, and contested travel limits. International interest is expected to be intense enough that the Federal Court of Justice took the unusual step of borrowing a grand hall. Intensity of attention is not the same thing as a change in the charge sheet. The McCann file remains open and uncharged. The Leipzig date is a fight over whether five other verdicts were legally sustainable. Treating those two tracks as one story is how a court listing becomes a “game changer” in print while remaining, in the statute books, a review of an existing judgment.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/oct/14/secret-dna-test-confirmed-alleged-stalker-was-not-madeleine-mccann-says-officer