Austria plans tougher sentences for crimes against women

VIENNA: Austria’s right-wing government announced on Wednesday tougher sentences for violent crimes, particularly against female victims, while pointing to a recent spate of cases in which foreigners are suspected of murdering women.

Austria’s ruling coalition of conservatives and the farright came to power on the back of Europe’s migration crisis, pledging to prevent a repeat of that influx in which the country took in about 1 per cent of its population in asylum seekers in 2015 alone, many from the Middle East and Afghanistan.

The latest crime statistics available, those for 2017, show the number of crimes overall and violent crimes falling in the Alpine republic, which also has one of the lowest murder rates in the European Union.

But the tabloid press and the government have seized on eight unrelated killings of women this year, most believed by police to have been committed by foreigners, as an unacceptable spike.

“We have seen at the beginning of this year that an almost eerie series of murders has struck this country,” Interior Minister Herbert Kickl of the far-right Freedom Party told a news conference outlining the planned measures.

“We observe that very, very often people involved in these violent crimes are not Austrian and are from other countries and other cultures,” Kickl told the joint news conference with conservative Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and other ministers.

Kickl’s comments, however, are the latest by this government juxtaposing immigration and crime but stopping short of saying one causes the other. The main suspect in the latest murder, committed in Vienna on Tuesday night, is a Bosnian citizen.