Council of Europe praises Austria’s hate-crime reforms but flags persistent anti-Muslim discrimination — especially against schoolgirls

STRASBOURG (MNTV) — The Council of Europe’s independent anti-racism body has delivered a mixed verdict on Austria, commending the country for strengthening how it defines and records hate crime while warning that anti-Muslim hostility, antisemitism, and a toxic public debate around migration continue to undermine equal treatment — with Muslim schoolgirls singled out as a group still facing discrimination in education.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) published its latest country report on Austria on June 18, as part of its regular monitoring of member states. 

The assessment, which builds on its previous review in 2020, acknowledges genuine progress in some areas while making clear that significant problems remain.

What Austria got right

ECRI’s praise centred on improvements to the machinery of recording hate. 

It welcomed the introduction of electronic systems for logging hate incidents and collecting hate-crime data, noting that the Interior Ministry rolled out guidance in November 2020 that included a formal definition of hate crime, a system of “bias indicators” to help identify motivation, and stronger data-quality management. 

More recently, the Justice Ministry issued a decree calling for more precise categorisation of hate crimes — a step toward making the scale of the problem more visible and measurable.

It highlighted positive developments in Vienna, where an institute focused on women’s and men’s health runs workplace health-promotion projects for vulnerable groups in multiple languages.

Where Austria falls short

The report’s concerns were substantial and pointed. ECRI noted that racist discourse — including anti-Muslim discourse — alongside antisemitic incidents and online hate speech continue to pose serious challenges. 

It drew particular attention to the negative climate dominating public debate around migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, a framing that has become a defining feature of Austrian politics.

Most notably for Muslim communities, the commission explicitly called for continued efforts to ensure equal treatment and inclusion in schools for groups vulnerable to discrimination — naming Muslim schoolgirls and pupils of African descent specifically. 

The reference to Muslim girls is significant given Austria’s recent move to ban headscarves for schoolgirls up to the age of 14, a law that the country’s Islamic Religious Community is challenging before the Constitutional Court and that a Georgetown University survey found 93 per cent of Muslim women in Austria oppose. 

While ECRI’s report does not adjudicate that specific law, its emphasis on equal treatment for Muslim schoolgirls lands directly in the middle of one of Austria’s most contentious current debates.

The commission also raised concerns beyond race and religion, including medical practices still reportedly oriented toward the early surgical alteration of intersex children’s sex characteristics in situations where their health is not at risk, and inconsistencies between provincial and federal equal-treatment laws that weaken protections in education and healthcare.

What ECRI is asking for

The commission issued a series of formal requests to Austrian authorities. 

It called on the government to develop a national action plan against hate speech and hate crime covering all forms of racism and intolerance, with proper funding for implementation and regular evaluation — a recommendation that echoes broader European criticism that Austria, like most EU states, lacks a dedicated national strategy against anti-Muslim racism.

ECRI also asked Austria to bring forward legislation prohibiting medical interventions on a person’s sex characteristics without appropriate safeguards, to review the content of school textbooks relating to Africa and people of African descent, and to commission independent reviews of school education legislation and equal-treatment laws at both federal and provincial level with a view to proposing reforms.

The broader picture

The report’s central message is one of qualified encouragement: Austria has built better tools for identifying and recording hate, but the underlying hostility those tools are meant to measure remains entrenched, particularly toward Muslims and migrants. 

ECRI stressed that technical improvements in data collection mean little without sustained political will and genuine cooperation with civil society.

That caution carries particular weight in the Austrian context. 

The country recorded the highest rate of anti-Muslim discrimination of any nation surveyed in the EU’s 2024 Fundamental Rights Agency study, with 71 per cent of Muslim respondents reporting discrimination in the preceding five years. 

Its political mainstream has increasingly adopted the rhetoric of the far-right Freedom Party, which won the most votes in the 2024 national election, and its government has pursued headscarf restrictions framed as protecting girls even as the affected community overwhelmingly rejects them.

ECRI’s report, in effect, hands Austria a scorecard that acknowledges the progress while making clear that the harder work — confronting the discrimination embedded in its schools, its public discourse, and its treatment of Muslim children — has barely begun.