Austria: Enduring Persecution of Gay Men


Almost Exclusive Enforcement Against Gay Men

Platform Against Art. 209 calls for repeal of the substitute for the anti-homosexual Art. 209

Austrian Minister of Justice, Karin Miklautsch, in replying to a parliamentary question announced that the substitute provision for anti-homosexual Art. 209 Criminal Code, repealed in 2002, while being gender-neutral in wording, still is enforced nearly exclusively against same-sex relations.

More than three quarters (78%) of all cases brought to court in the first half of 2004 concerned homosexual relations. All of the persons carcerated under that law were homosexual men.

One man has even been convicted despite the fact that the court did not know anything about his partners; the court did not the nature (!) or the amount of the remuneration nor did it know how “immediate inducement” (see Art. 207b par. 3 below) did take place; it did not even know the identity or the age (!) of the adolescents. The Minister of Justice – despite having been specifically asked for – refused to reveal how the court, on this basis, could come to a conviction, what reasons it has given for the conviction.