International Human Rights Tribunal

[1][2][3][4] It was chaired by environmental and human rights activist Freda Meissner-Blau and Gerhard Oberschlick, editor of FORVM, and was dedicated to the persecution of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender persons in Austria from 1945 to 1995.

Amongst the members were Jacques Gaillot, bishop of Partenia, politicians Mel Read (UK), Svend Robinson (Canada), Claudia Roth (Germany) and Terezija Stoisits (Austria), writers Kuno Knöbl, Christine Nöstlinger and Gerhard Roth, developmentalist Robert Chambers (Frankfurt), sociologist Bernd Marin and human rights lawyer Manfred Nowak (both Vienna), political scientist Anton Pelinka (Innsbruck), as well as other academic scholars like Igor S. Kon (Moscow), Asa G. Rachmanova (Saint Petersburg), Douglas Sanders (Vancouver), Theo Sandfort (Utrecht) and Christopher Williams (Preston, UK), as well as human rights activists, publicists and LGBT activists from Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway and Peru.

Chaired by Meissner-Blau and Oberschlick, the jury of the tribunal consisted of prominent personalities from Austria's civil society, amongst them theologian Kurt Lüthi, philosophers Rudolf Burger and Oliver Marchart [de], writers Josef Haslinger, Doron Rabinovici and Katharina Riese, politicians Friedrun Huemer (The Greens) and Volker Kier (Liberal Forum), actress Mercedes Echerer, psychotherapists Rotraud Perner [de], Alfred Pritz [de] and Jutta Zinnecker, judge Norbert Gerstberger, lawyers Nadja Lorenz and Alfred Noll, cultural scientist and activist Dieter Schrage, four journalists, an editor, two unionists, two medical doctors as well as several human rights activists.

Discrimination in the general public consisted of four journalists, an editor, a sociologist, writer Haslinger, theologian Lüthi, actress Echerer and psychotherapist Perner.

On the first day of the tribunal, MP Johannes Jarolim [de], member of the ruling Social Democratic Party, sat on the defence bench as amicus curiae, not defending the republic, but rather stating that he agreed with all the changes in the penal code demanded.