The Jewish community is almost alone in expressing reservations over recent legislation intended to make easier the punishment of neo-Nazi offenders.
The amendments to existing laws, which swept through Parliament with considerable fanfare last month, are expected to achieve that end by reducing the severity of the penalties mandated for various kinds of neo-Nazi activity.
The minimum sentence for denying that gas chambers existed at Auschwitz can be as low as one-year imprisonment under the new law. Previously, that kind of Holocaust denial was punishable by up to five years. But convictions were rare.
The rationale behind the amendments is that stiff penalties are useless if juries shrink from imposing them. Sentences of 20 years to life were mandatory for attempting to reactivate Nazi ideology. But juries would rather free defendants than subject them to a life term.
Now the penalty for establishing, organizing or supporting a Nazi organization is 10 to 20 years. Sentences for less serious activity has been reduced to a range of one to 10 years, where previously it was five to 10.
But the objections raised by Paul Grosz, president of the Austrian Jewish community, and Simon Wiesenthal, head of the War Crimes Documentation Center in Vienna, are not to the reduced level of punishment.
Their complaint is that the laws are unclear with respect to neo-Nazi offenses “in public.”
Grosz pointed out that “most of the poisonous talk and verbal influence happens in smaller circles.
“No instrument was created to shield the youngsters in school, at the beer gardens or in smaller groups,” he observed.
Of all the parties in Parliament, only the opposition Green-Alternative had the same complaint.
During the debate, the Greens favored changes in the law but criticized the amendments for not being specific enough.
Behind the changes was a genuine concern for Austria’s image at a time when neo-Nazi activity has become more violent and widespread, but few offenders go to jail.
The Social Democrats and Christian Conservatives, the two major parties which govern in coalition, had sufficient votes between them to pass the amendments when they were voted on in Parliament on Feb. 26.
But the smaller factions jumped on the bandwagon, including the rightist Freedom Party, which usually exploits xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments in the country.
Meanwhile, Education Minister Rudolph Scholten tried to assure doubters that existing laws provide adequate protection for students against neo-Nazi propaganda.
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