Conservative-Green Government Programme  

It will remain legal in Austria, solely on the basis of sexual orientation, to throw persons out of a taxi, to refuse them hotel- or guest-house rooms and rented apartments and to harass them in general schools. In the 21st century´s third decade and despite marriage equality. The conservative-green coalition deal not just lacks a ban of discrimination outside the work-place.

It lacks rehabilitation of the victims of homophobic criminal persecution, it lacks removal of the discriminatory blood donation ban for men having sex with men, it lacks an explicit ban of intersex genital mutilation, it lacks the removal of the diagnosis-requirement for trans-persons as well as measures against homphobic hate-crimes.

Instead it provides nothing then peanuts, like enforcement of a Constitutional Court judgment (sic). While it fails even to follow an unanimous call of the federal parliament from last summer to ban conversion-therapies on minors, which even the conservatives and the populist right voted for. And it announces re-introduction (from Austria´s darkest times) of preventive-detention allowing for the arrest of any mentally sound, adult persons not even under suspicion of having committed, attempted or conspired to commit an offence, just on the basis of being labelled as causing "danger" to society.

"For almost 25 years now Austrian politics has achieved nothing for the LGBTI-community, only the courts did", says Dr. Helmut Graupner, president of Rechtskomitee LAMBDA (RKL), Austria´s LGBTI-rights organisation, "unfortunately it will stay that way".

Full press release in German