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[Nettime-bold] Austrian Justice, Letters to President Klestil, |
Haider, Pelinka Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: Alexander Nekvasil <a8504902@unet.univie.ac.at> Date: 25 Jun 2000 19:26:34 +0200 Message-ID: <ituxd645.fsf@panurg.dyndns.org> Lines: 52 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0806 (Gnus v5.8.6) Emacs/20.5 MIME-Version: 1.0 Two Scattered Remarks about Austrian Justice, Haider, Pelinka, Letters to President Klestil, and Similar Issues. I. The legal situation of the Pelinka case is more complicated than it seems. There is a law in Austria which bans attempts to re-enact national socialism ("Verbotsgesetz"). No one, therefore, except a few puerile boy scoutish folks, declares himself a nazi. Openly, that is. On the other hand, to state that someone else is a nazi amounts to accusing this person of a crime which may entail lifelong imprisonment in case that person is convicted. The courts have developed some formulas about what, apart from the obvious cases, constitutes that crime. The expression Pelinka used is among them--which, I dare conjecture, Pelinka knows very well. Now if Haider is prosecuted, and if the court uses, in its sentence, the same words Pelinka used, Haider will go to jail for at least five years, end of story. There is only one way, for Haider, to avoid that this expression "sticks": the libel suit. To call this an attempt to silence opposition is a terrible simplification, because, in this case, Haider _is_ the opposition. II. Among the cases the professors mention in their letter there is one missing; as it happens, it is the most shameful one for the Austrian justice system. A couple of years ago, Austria's Supreme Court (Oberster Gerichtshof) flatly refused to comply with a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights and did not overturn a sentence against another journalist, Gerd Oberschlick, in another defamation case. Oberschlick had charged the secretary of the FPOE of the time with breaking the Verbotsgesetz because of his suggestion to cut family benefits for "Gastarbeiter", immigration workers. cheers AN _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold