Until the 2019 reporting year, the "Security Report - Report on the Activities of the Criminal Justice System" only contained information on offense groups or individual offense phenomena connected to convictions. Until then, offense-specific figures on relevant preliminary proceedings, indictments or acquittals only offered an overview of terrorism offenses in addition to convictions. The chapters actually generated on the basis of the judicial statistics, on the other hand, did not contain a breakdown by offense. The reports on terrorism offenses thus did not adhere to the systematic structure of the report. They did, however, show that the judicial statistics on criminal cases can now be analysed by individual offenses, a possibility that had not been available until then.

Following a parliamentary mandate for "corruption statistics", the Federal Ministry of Justice commissioned the Department of Applied Sociology of Law and Criminology to prepare an offense-specific chapter on this for the first time for the Security Report 2019. In this chapter, judicial activity on the corruption offenses of the Criminal Code was presented in detail alongside the level of judicial convictions in time courses, in regional comparison, for each offense group and for individual offenses. In connection with the corruption statistics, the Department of Applied Sociology of Law and Criminology also prepared proposals for restructuring chapters 1 and 2 (The Activity of the Criminal Justice System and Convictions) of the Security Report. The aim of these proposals is to create clearer classification criteria and more comprehensible sequence presentations as well as incorporating the new possibilities for detailed presentations of the handling of offenses and offense groups by judges and prosecutors.

The IRKS’ continued support for the further development of the judicial part of the security report follows on from the corruption statistics in the 2019 Security Report and the proposals for restructuring it. It takes up the plan to present corresponding detailed presentations for additional selected offense areas in the 2020 Security Report. Terrorism offenses under sections 278b to g and 282a of the Criminal Code were selected for this purpose. In addition, two pilot chapters will be prepared based on the present considerations and the data for 2020.

Funded by the Austrian Ministry of Justice.

Project Period

July 2021 to March 2022

Project Manager

Walter Hammerschick

Projektmitarbeit

Meropi Tzanetakis

Arno Pilgram