Austria debates tougher line on sex crimes
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 18:32:00 05/02/2008
Filed Under: Crime, Law & Justice
VIENNA -- The horrific case of a woman held as a sex slave by her father in a windowless cell for 24 years has sparked a ferocious debate in Austria over whether current sentencing for sex crimes is too lenient.
Even the coalition government of the Social Democrats (SPOe) and the conservative OeVP appears divided over the issue, with ministers from the two ruling parties taking different lines.
The debate flared up after it was revealed last weekend that Josef Fritzl, 73, imprisoned and sexually abused his daughter Elisabeth in a cramped dungeon beneath their family home for more than two decades.
The revelations sparked calls for much tougher sentences for rapists and pedophiles.
But in a newspaper interview published Friday, Justice Minister Maria Berger, a Social Democrat, insisted that current sentencing -- "of up to 15 or 20 years, or life if the victim dies" -- was draconian enough.
"Longer than life is unthinkable," Berger told the daily Kurier.
Any debate over changes to the law would in any case have no bearing on the Fritzl case because even if the law was changed, it could not be applied retroactively, she added.
Earlier this week, Berger made it clear that she felt the maximum sentence for rape in Austria of 15 years was sufficient.
"This type criminal does not care about the length of sentence," she said. "We already have very tough sentences. Tougher ones would not deter them from their crimes."
But Berger's colleague Interior Minister Guenther Platter, of the conservative OeVP, the other member of the coalition, has called for tougher sentences for sex crimes.
Opposition politicians also called for a tougher line.
"Fifteen years for destroying human lives is absolutely unacceptable," said Harald Vilimsky, spokesman for public safety policy in the opposition conservative Freedom Party.
"Any punishment that falls even a single day short of a life sentence, in reality, makes a mockery of the victims," Vilimsky added. The only response was "a true life sentence without any chance of parole," he said.
Gerald Grosz, secretary general of the far-right populist BZOe party, called for "drastically tougher sentences for any sort of violence against children. We want prison terms of up to life for serious cases of abuse."
The case of Josef Fritzl has also put the spotlight on Austria's practice of expunging criminal records after a prescribed amount of time.
Depending on the severity of the crime, a conviction can be expunged after five but no longer than 15 years, unless the crime carries a life sentence.
Police investigating the case insist that when he reported his daughter missing to the authorities 24 years ago and routine background checks were carried out, his criminal record was clean.
The same was true when Fritzl, who impregnated his daughter seven times during her ordeal, applied to legally adopt three of the children born out of the abuse.
He claimed Elisabeth had run away to join an obscure religious sect and deposited them on his doorstep asking him to look after them.
But the regional daily Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten reported Friday that a court file and a police file on a rape committed by Fritzl in October 1967 had turned up in official archives in Linz.
The head of the far-right BZOe party, Peter Westenthaler, has argued that no sex conviction, however minor, should ever be wiped.
Justice Minister Platter has said that convictions of serious sex crimes should never be wiped. Even for less serious crimes he added, they should be kept on record much longer, minister Platter argued.
Here again however, the two ministers appeared to differ.
Justice Minister Berger said that under new draft legislation recently drawn up to afford greater protection to victims, the maximum time before a conviction is expunged had been extended to 30 years.
"Expunging the conviction is meant to give people a new chance. But for sex criminals who continue to be classified as dangerous, we've proposed extending the expungement deadline by up to 100 percent," Berger said.
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