Erstellt am: 8. 3. 2013 - 15:05 Uhr

NGOs Slam "Mild" Verdict in U-Bahn Assault

An overly mild sentence? NEW: Hear what a lawyer from the anti racism group Zara has to say.

"Frankly I was deeply shocked and upset about this verdict. It is unthinkable and unacceptable – a really dramatic error of judgment in my opinion," says Amnesty International's Heinz Patzelt, reacting to the sentence of one year of probation for aggravated assault handed down to a Viennese man who pushed a 36-year old Kenyan woman onto the rails of the U1 underground line at Taborstraße.

Wikipedia / Public Domain / Peter Gugerell

The judge decided it couldn't be proven that the man intended to injure the woman and that he had acted in "a stress situation."

So the man walked free and the disappointed injured woman was left to hobble out of court with her leg in plaster. Sometimes a picture tells a thousands words. The verdict led to a storm of protest on social media sites with many agreeing with Patzelt that the sentence was too mild.

In a phone interview, Patzelt emphasized that Amnesty, which has always been a champion of the importance of an independent judiciary, didn't want to comment on the verdict of an individual judge. But he said he had been dismayed at the fact that the possible racial element in the incident, which he called an "obvious and evident aspect of the case", seems to have been ignored.

The man, a 51-year old electrician, told the court that the incident began over a dispute over a mobile phone conversation. During a late night encounter on the platform of the underground station he and his wife demanded that the Kenyan woman and her friend, who is also from Kenya, should stop talking loudly on the phone. An argument broke out, escalated, and ultimately the man, by his own admission, slapped the woman and shoved her onto the rails before fleeing the scene. Crucially, the man, who says his wife was insulted, is accused of using racist language.

"In the Austrian penal code there is a very clear paragraph addressing the aggravation of any illegal act if there is a racist or xenophobic background. Yet neither the police nor the prosecutor nor the judge in her wording stressed this paragraph."

Only the electrician can know the true motivation for his attack but Patzelt says that in such a case of a dark-skinned woman being attacked by a white-skinned man it is a duty of the Austrian police and prosecutor to clearly investigate the possibility of racist undertones. The human rights expert says he would have accepted it had he felt that the issue had been properly investigated and the authorities "had decided that rather than a racist assault it had been just been a normal quarrel with a dramatic outcome". But he says "that this was not even evaluated is really a misunderstanding of the Austrian legal system. The court must seriously consider whether there is a racial element or not."

Patzelt has been backed up by the pressure group SOS Mitmensch, whose spokesman Alexander Pollak was equally dismayed a possible racist background to the incident appeared to remain unexamined in this case: "If we have a judiciary that ignores racism or trivializes it," he says, "then we have a massive problem with the rule of law." SOS Mitmensch is calling for "concrete steps towards a greater anti-racist awareness" within the police.

Pollak says that "racism destroys societies. There is therefore very clear boundaries, and so racist transgression must have tangible consequences." That, he says, requires authorities that "are not blind to racism."

The prosecution is appealing the verdict.