Antisemitic incidents, including physical attacks, name-calling, property damage, and threatening letters, telephone calls, and Internet postings occurred during the year.
It offers member organisations legal advice and support in cases of discrimination based on gender, ethnicity or origin, sexual orientation, disability, age, religion and belief.
In August, a Vienna court found four members of the elite Wiener Einsatzgruppe Alarmabteilung police unit guilty of torturing and seriously injuring Gambian asylum seeker Bakary J. earlier in the year during a deportation incident.
[citation needed] In 2005 the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) reported a "considerable number" of allegations of police mistreatment of criminal detainees.
[2] Prison conditions generally met international standards in many areas, and the government permitted visits by independent human rights observers.
Some human rights observers criticized the incarceration of nonviolent offenders, such as persons awaiting deportation, for long periods in single cells or inadequate facilities designed for temporary detention.
On August 31, a senior Vienna police officer, Ernst Geiger, received a three-month suspended sentence for violation of confidentiality rules.
During the year the interior ministry conducted racial sensitivity training programs for over 2,000 police and other officials with NGO assistance.
The report concluded that, as there is no effective system of free legal aid for indigent persons in police custody, any right of access to a lawyer at that stage remains, in most cases, purely theoretical.
On February 20, the Vienna regional court convicted British writer David Irving and sentenced him to a three years in prison on charges of neo-Nazi activity.
In 1989 Irving reportedly denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and claimed that unknown individuals dressed in Sturmabteilung uniforms committed the Reichskristallnacht crimes in November 1934.
On April 26, the Vienna Criminal Court convicted John Gudenus, a former Freedom Party member of the upper house of parliament, to a one-year suspended sentence for violating the law banning neo-Nazi activity.
In public interviews in 2005, Gudenus had questioned the existence of gas chambers and belittled the suffering of concentration camp inmates during the Holocaust.
Numerous unrecognized religious groups have complained that the law obstructs legitimate claims for recognition and relegates them to second-class status.
As of December the European Court of Human Rights had not ruled on a 2003 complaint by the Jehovah's Witnesses challenging the legality of the requirement that a group must exist for 10 years in the country before it can be recognized by the government.
GSK distributed information to schools and the general public and offered counseling to persons who believe that sects and cults had hurt their lives.
On September 11, police destroyed a suspicious device, which turned out to be a fake bomb, in front of the Muslim Youth office in Vienna.
On 26 November 2006, a 24-year-old Croatian man went on a rampage in the Jewish Lauder Chabad School, breaking windows, glass doors, and showcases with an iron rod.
EURODAC, the EU's system for comparing fingerprints of asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants, has facilitated the application of the Dublin Convention.
The government has in the past (during the Kosovo crisis and as a result of hostilities in Afghanistan) also provided temporary protection to individuals who did not qualify as refugees under the 1951 convention or 1967 protocol under a mechanism whereby victims of armed conflict may be admitted to the country.
Authorities can only deny access if it would violate substantial data protection rights or would involve information that is of national security interest.
However, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) characterized the council as ineffective and unable to obtain the cooperation of the security services, citing that the country's criminal code was lacking severity in certain instances.
On the basis of the Federal Equality Commission's findings, labor courts may award compensation of up to four months' salary to women who experienced discrimination in promotion because of their gender.
Authorities estimated that organized crime groups from Eastern Europe controlled a large portion of human trafficking in the country.
According to police, there also were cases of women who knowingly entered the country to work as prostitutes, but were forced into dependency akin to slavery.
The government provided temporary residence, limited to the duration of the trial, to trafficking victims who were prepared to testify or who intended to file civil lawsuits.
A 2005 report by the domestic NGO Zivilcourage und Anti-Rassismus Arbeit, in conjunction with other groups, found that persons from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds faced increasing discrimination from government officials, particularly the police, as well as in the workplace and in housing.
In September the Ministry of Interior renewed an agreement with the Anti-Defamation League to teach police officers cultural sensitivity, religious tolerance, and the acceptance of minorities.
Government programs, including providing financing for tutors, have helped school age Romani children move out of "special needs" and into mainstream classes.
In December the Constitutional Court ruled that the state of Carinthia must install additional bilingual town signs in German and Slovene.