Austria

Following the launch of the new electronic recording and data collection mechanism in November 2020, the Ministry of Interior (MoI) continued training police officers on hate crime via a three-module e-learning course delivered through the e-Campus of the Police Training Academy (Sicherheitsakademie, SIAK). As of 10 May 2021, a total of 22,788 police officers had completed the course. In addition, 200 police officers from the Federal Provinces were trained to deliver training events to front-line officers and to serve as contact points for CSOs and victim support organizations. In May 2021, an additional module was launched for prosecutors and judges. 

In 2021, the MoI developed a factsheet on hate crime, which was translated into nine languages. Together with the Institute for the Sociology of Law and Criminology (Institut für Rechts- und Kriminalsoziologie, IRKS), the MoI conducted a hate crime victimization survey on unreported cases via 2,325 telephone interviews. Nearly 4 per cent of respondents reported being a victim of a hate crime. The survey also found that the security perception of hate crime victims was significantly worse than that of victims of crimes committed without a bias motive. The likelihood of victims reporting hate crimes was found to be far lower compared to crimes committed without a bias motive. In June 2021, the survey results were published in a Pilot Report on "Hate Crime in Austria", which maps the improvements in hate crime recording and data collection in Austria since 2019.  

Notable cases: 

Case 1: Graz, October 2021: A person in a wheelchair was hit over the head with a beer can, threatened with death ("I kill you, then you do not need a wheelchair anymore") and had their wheelchair kicked by a known perpetrator. The police registered the case as a hate crime against persons with disabilities. 

Case 2: Vienna, May 2021: A person was repeatedly subjected to racist insults, kicked and knocked to the ground. The police registered the case as a hate crime under the categories "ethnic origin" and "skin colour". 

Case 3: Vienna, May 2021: A young female student was reading a book titled "The Jews in the Modern world" on the metro. The victim was then subjected to anti-Semitic and misogynistic threats and insults and had her hair pulled by several men. At the next stop, the victim asked two police officers for help, but was told to forget the incident as she is not Jewish. The case was extensively covered by national media networks, including the national radio. Consequently, the Viennese Police apologized and filed the case. However, as the video surveillance footage had already been deleted, the perpetrators could not be found. The case significantly strengthened public awareness of hate crime and anti-Semitism, including in Germany. See, for example, the following reports: https://wien.orf.at/stories/3107040/; https://www.juedischeallgemeine.de/juedische-welt/attacke-in-der-wiener-u-bahn/; https://www.krone.at/2424508; and https://www.rtl.de/cms/wien-19-jaehrige-studentin-antisemitischbeleidigt-weil-sie-ein-buch-ueber-juden-liest-4770023.html.