{"id":371542,"date":"2018-07-31T11:39:39","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T10:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/acquittal-for-right-wing-extremist-identitarian-movement-in-austrian-court-2\/"},"modified":"2018-07-31T11:39:39","modified_gmt":"2018-07-31T10:39:39","slug":"acquittal-for-right-wing-extremist-identitarian-movement-in-austrian-court-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/acquittal-for-right-wing-extremist-identitarian-movement-in-austrian-court-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Acquittal for right-wing extremist Identitarian movement in Austrian court"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"content\">\n<h3 class=\"nomargin\">\u00a0<\/h3>\n<h2>Acquittal for right-wing extremist Identitarian movement in Austrian court<\/h2>\n<h5>\n<p>    By<br \/>\n    Sven Heymanns<br \/>\n    <br \/>31 July 2018<\/p>\n<\/h5>\n<p>Seventeen members of the Austrian Identitarian Movement (IB\u00d6) were acquitted by the Graz District Court on all main charges in their case last Thursday. According to the court, the accused were not guilty of sedition, or the formation of or participation in a criminal association. Only two of the accused were convicted of minor charges. The ruling is yet to come into force.<\/p>\n<p>The court\u2019s decision speaks volumes about the sharp rightward shift in Austria and throughout Europe. Seven months after the coalition government made up of the conservative Austrian People\u2019s Party (\u00d6VP) and the far-right Freedom Party (FP\u00d6) took office in Vienna, racists and neo-Nazis can present themselves to a court as \u201cconcerned citizens\u201d and walk free despite employing methods akin to the Nazi SA.<\/p>\n<p>The Identitarians are a right-wing extremist group that emerged 16 years ago in France and now maintains close connections to a network of far-right parties and militant neo-Nazi groups across Europe. They are notorious for their provocations, which often involve the intimidation of immigrants and political opponents with the use of physical violence. Two weeks ago, the Identitarians attacked a meeting of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality at the Technical University in Dresden.<\/p>\n<p>In Graz, the defendants included 16 men and a woman, aged between 20 and 35. Among the accused was Martin Sellner, a leading figure within the Identitarians who has ties to leading German right-wing extremists like Bj\u00f6rn H\u00f6cke, Andre Poggenburg and G\u00f6tz Kubitschek, and also appeared at Pegida demonstrations in Dresden. The right-wing extremists were accused of spreading \u201cradical xenophobic&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2018\/07\/31\/graz-j31.html\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 Acquittal for right-wing extremist Identitarian movement in Austrian court By Sven Heymanns 31 July 2018 Seventeen members of the Austrian Identitarian Movement (IB\u00d6) were acquitted by the Graz District Court on all main charges in their case last Thursday. According to the court, the accused were not guilty of sedition, or the formation of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2526,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-371542","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}