Austria’s conservative-nationalist coalition government wants police to be more transparent about sex attackers, and to reveal their nationality and whether they are an asylum seeker as a matter of course.
Standing guidelines from the Justice Ministry advise that the ethnic and religious background of criminal suspects “should only be indicated when it is absolutely necessary for understanding the event in question” — leaving the public in the dark more often than not.
But the interior ministry, led by Herbert Kickl of the nationalist Freedom Party (FPO), which serves as the junior partner in Austria’s new populist coalition government, wants to change this, according to Deutsche Welle.
The German public broadcaster, citing Austrian media, reports that the interior ministry is now asking police to “proactively” release more information on sex offenders, in particular, “especially with crimes committed in public with considerable degree of violence or coercion or when there is no connection between the perpetrator and the victim.”
The e-mail to law enforcement outlining the request explicitly requests that sex offenders’ “status of residence and whether they are an asylum seeker” is made clear to the public as a matter of course.
Breitbart London reported in January 2018 that criminals with foreign backgrounds were making up some 40 percent of criminal suspects in Austria, with asylum seekers — most of whom arrived since the onset Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis in late 2015 — accounting for almost half of foreign suspects.
Breitbart London further reported that in the Austrian capital of Vienna foreigners are even more overrepresented among criminal suspects, accounting for more than half of the total, in August 2018.
It is not clear, however, that the police will actually abide by the interior ministry’s request to be more forthcoming about the background of sex attackers, with the content of its email being characterised as as “suggestions and comments” which have “no mandatory or even instructional character”.
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