Progress: No progress
Consolidate and strengthen existing anti-discrimination legislation to provide comprehensive equal protection, particularly in access to goods and services, on all prohibited grounds of discrimination
Proponent:
Ireland
Ireland
Remarks to progress by Liga (last modified Dec 31, 2024):
Austria has still not implemented standardised and comprehensive legal protection against discrimination. Austrian equality law is still characterised by a discriminatory hierarchy of grounds for discrimination with large gaps in protection outside the world of work. When it comes to access to goods and services, federal law (which is applicable in the majority of all cases) only provides protection against discrimination on the basis of disability, ethnicity and gender – but not on the basis of age, religion and belief or sexual orientation, and therefore not in the case of multiple discrimination. Furthermore, there is no comprehensive protection against discrimination based on all grounds of discrimination in the area of education and there is no comprehensive protection against discrimination in a number of areas of social protection. There is no explicit legal protection against intersectional discrimination and discrimination based on gender identity, expression or characteristics. The anti-discrimination laws and the respective equality bodies at federal and state level are organised very differently, which makes access to justice more difficult. Those affected by discrimination usually have to take legal action individually. The amounts of damages awarded in practice are low and there is a lack of effective statutory minimum compensation and injunctive relief. A collective action as a collective legal protection instrument only exists in cases of discrimination on the basis of disability. The current government programme 2025-2029 does not provide for the elimination of these inequalities in discrimination protection (see government programme 2025-2029 as a PDF on the website of the Federal Chancellery: https://www.bundeskanzleramt.gv.at/bundeskanzleramt/die-bundesregierung/regierungsdokumente.html available).
