Austrian justice minister wants to tighten law after spying scandal
Austrian Justice Minister Alma Zadić wants to tighten up the country's criminal law in response to an alleged espionage scandal involving Russia.
Currently, only agent activities that are to the detriment of Austria are punishable, but in future all agent activities should be prohibited, regardless of who they are directed against, she told the ORF broadcaster and the APA news agency on Thursday.
"The current news makes us realize that it is necessary to close these loopholes in criminal law," she said.
The initiative was triggered by investigations into a former Austrian official from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution who is suspected of having accessed government databases on behalf of Russia. The ex-official was arrested last week and is in custody.
The planned tightening of the law is also linked in a broader sense to the suspected connection between the suspect and former Wirecard board member Jan Marsalek, dpa has learnt.
The Viennese weekly newspaper Falter published excerpts from the arrest warrant for the official online on Wednesday evening. According to the document from the public prosecutor's office he had allegedly "systematically collected secret facts and findings not intended for the public as well as personal data from police databases for the purpose of transmitting them to Jan Marsalek and to unknown representatives of the Russian authorities."
In the view of the judicial investigators the official had spied on exiled opponents of the Russian regime on behalf of Moscow.
