Austrian government rewarded state prosecutor responsible for illegal interrogation of investigative journalists with promotion: “Justice system run amok” says leading newspaper editor : European Arrest Warrant means risk of persecution now faced by non-Austrians too

The Austrian state prosecutor who ordered the illegal interrogation of Austrian journalists by police was promoted on September 1, 2010, it has emerged.

http://www.edikte.justiz.gv.at/planstellen/ausschreibungen.nsf/0/47C18304E99D83BBC1257782003D4532

Heike-Karin Heckl ordered the interrogation of journalists from the news magazines “Profil” and “News” as “guilty parties” in relation to their reports on the Hypo Alpe Adria scandal almost immediately after receiving an illegal request from German state prosecutors on August 2, 2010.

http://www.profil.at/articles/1038/560/278362/wie-staatsanwaltschaft-beschuldigte

The journalists had quoted from state prosecutor’s files in Munich – something that is considered a crime in Germany but that is  legal in Austria, and something the journalists have been doing without a problem for a year.

By August 22, a police chief had the instructions and he summoned the Profil journalists Michael Nikbakhsh  and Ulla Schmid on September 15^th and September 22 where they were asked about their income, their property and their financial affairs even though had violated no law.

Instead of being punished for misusing her authority to harass journalists who are reporting on one of the biggest fraud’s in the country’s history carried out by bankers and politicians, Heckl was actually promoted by her superiors on September 1^st – presumably as a reward for her willingness to misuse her authority for the benefit of the network of politicians and bankers who have stolen so much tax money in the engineered financial crisis in the first place.

Figures such as Bavaria’s Ex Minister Edmund Stoiber are implicated in the Hypo scandal.

The outrageous promotion for a state prosecutor caught authorising illegal interrogations of journalists underlines the extent of the destruction of law and justice in Austria currently underway.

Instead of fighting corruption, the judges and prosecutors are now overtly persecuting anyone who reports on the corruption and with total any impunity. Promotions in such a system evidently depend only on the extent to which state prosecutors have proved themselves to be willing to crush critics of crimes committed by a network of politicians and banks acting in collusion to rob tax payers of billions.

This is the same justice system that is planning such a radical new anti terrorism law that virtually any critic of the government can be arrested under it, prompting alarm among Austrian lawyer’s association head Gerhard Benn-Ibler.

In addition, the introduction of the European Arrest Warrant – a tool that Austrian Justice Minister Claudia Bandion Ortner worryingly said should be used more often during a conference in Berlin last week – will virtually allow anyone in Europe to be arrested and brought to Austria illegally or for  some vague “political” crime, for example, for visiting any websites “forbidden”  as terrorist by the government under  “mafia” paragraph 278.

The outrageous tactics of the state prosecutors only came to light on Thursday after Profil decided to publish the information on their website because there was no apology.

Only following the publicity did the Justice Minister Dr Claudia Bandion-Ortner — under fire for treating bankers embroiled in gigantic fraud at the cost of the Austrian tax payer with kid gloves while seeking to crush all their critics — admit a “mistake” had been made and Heckl had no legal right at all to order the interrogation of the journalists.

The incident leading to the de facto criminalisation of investigative journalism in Austria has sparked a storm of protest even in the usually tame media, funded largely by government subsidies.

Warnings are being rightfully issued from journalists, unions and politicians that democracy in this country is in danger if the small flame of critical journalism still left is entirely extinguished and in a way that is eerily similar to the Nazi regime, which set about destroying the free press as soon as it came to power in 1933.

The revelation that journalists were interrogated illegally by the police in Austria follows the seizure of film material  from the ORF, state run television station by Austrian judges in violation of laws protecting the confidentiality of sources.

The head of ORF, who is appointed by the government, was fiercely criticised by journalists working for the organisation for handing over the material, and his claim that he was ready to go prison to “protect press freedom” was met with derision.

ORF chief Elmar Oberhausr defended his action by saying he did not want to waste Austrian licence payers money on a huge fine  – as if Austrian licence payers really want to fund a propaganda instrument for a totalitarian government that breaks the law ever more overtly and that covers up the fraud of Hypo Alpe Adria managers at the expense of tax payers!

The deputy editor of a major regional newspaper the Salzburger Nachrichten Andreas Koller said  the “justice system [had] run wild.”

He said democracy is in danger, echoing the fears of many.

http://mein.salzburg.com/blog/koller/2010/09/wildgewordene-justiz.html

“Democracy is not possible without press freedom. Press freedom is not possible without confidentiality of sources…Whoever removes it, removes a corner stone of democracy,” he said in a comment.

“That is why it is absolutely inacceptable when judges run amok seize film material from the ORF and state prosecutors run amok interrogate journalists as guilty. It concerns those investigative journalists without whose work the many affairs of Buwog to Grasser to Hypo would have been administered away a long time ago. It is these investigative journalists who force the state prosecutors to do their job. Now the justice system has hit back. It is a scandalous, a frightening incident.”

But is not just Austrians who need to be concerned about the total destruction of law and justice in the country with barely a day passing without a new revelation and scandal.

State prosecutors in Germany who should be helping to uncover the Hypo Alpe Adria scandal are actively trying to stop the general public getting key information by any means possible and are now ready to issue instructions to their allies in Austria to persecute journalists overtly.

At least, Austrians are still allowed to quote from judicial files. In Germany it is prohibited, ensuring that evidence of corporate crimes is censored and kept from the general public by a corrupt justice system.

Under the new European Arrest Warrant and trials in absentia, the problem of corrupt Austrian and German judges arresting and persecuting critics could soon become European-wide.

Every European needs to be concerned about an Austrian and German justice system that really has run amok and a total break down of justice in a way that last happened in the 1930s when a barbaric Nazi regime held the continent in its grip of terror.

As usual, none of the corporate controlled media outlets such as Bloomberg, AP or Reuters are reporting on this scandal.

I myself only escaped being stripped of all my civil rights and life long detention in a psychiatric institute following a court guardian process initiated by a judge on the basis of verifiable lies in connection with the inheritance of my late father – courts in Austria always administer estates unlike in the UK —  this August following publicity in the alternative media.

My only crime appears to be that I dared to report on the Baxter and swine flu pandemic scandals.

Before the Austrian government and banks can introduce their totalitarian police state and rob citizens even more flagrantly, the remnants of the free press would need to be silenced.

But judging from the reaction of the media, the Austrian government, facing a historical lows of support among the general population, has once more made a serious miscalculation and will be rocked by another scandal.

Heavy handed press censorship and the banning of political rights groups contributed to the only revolution against the Habsburg overlords in the country’s history in 1848.

Since then, the Habsburg dynasty with their bankers, the Rothschilds, have had to retreat even further behind closed doors to plot how to carry out their “Globalist” plans.

Acting like feudal lords, they have appointed ministers and functionaries of the justice system as “Vogts” to carry out the robbery and oppression of the “inferior” classes, charged with destroying and smearing anyone who gets in their way.

But now even the journalists in Austria are up in arms, and with a population thoroughly fed up with the government, there is a real whiff of revolution in the air.