Austria’s conservative-nationalist coalition government wants police to be more transparent about sex attackers, and to reveal their nationality and whether they are an asylum seeker as a matter of course.
Standing guidelines from the Justice Ministry advise that the ethnic and religious background of criminal suspects “should only be indicated when it is absolutely necessary for understanding the event in question” — leaving the public in the dark more often than not.
But the interior ministry, led by Herbert Kickl of the nationalist Freedom Party (FPO), which serves as the junior partner in Austria’s new populist coalition government, wants to change this, according to Deutsche Welle.