A court in Vienna ruled this week that Islamic Sharia law can be legally upheld in Austria in civil disputes, sparking accusations that the nation’s Christian values are being undermined by multiculturalism.
The Vienna Regional Court for Civil Law Matters has upheld the findings of a Sharia arbitration tribunal concerning a civil dispute between two men in Austria, with the group of informal Islamic mediators ruling that one owed the other €320,000 ($372,000).
The man appealed to the Vienna court, arguing that Sharia diktats have no standing in Austria and that the Islamic code violated the constitutional rights of the European country.
Yet, according to Kronen Zeitung, Vienna judges found that it was permissible for private individuals to settle civil disputes through the manner they saw fit, and that Sharia arbitration did not violate the basic law of Austria.
However, the court noted that this would only apply to civil matters and that Sharia is not applicable in criminal cases. Nevertheless, critics warned that the ruling demonstrated an erosion of the Western liberties and Christian ethics upon which Austria was founded.
Upper Austrian deputy governor Manfred Haimbuchner of the populist Freedom Party said that “Sharia is incompatible with our core values,” and added that the case was “another example of how our legal system and our constitutional state have nothing to counter the gradual appropriation of Islam.”
Variously called Sharia courts, tribunals, and councils, the arbitration bodies have established a presence in many European countries with a Islamic migrant population, including in the United Kingdom where they have been operating at least since the 1980s. A 2018 report found the UK government doesn’t know how many so-called Sharia courts operate in the UK and identified women’s safety concerns.
The Austria case comes in the wake of a bombshell report from the French government earlier this year, which found that the radical Muslim Brotherhood network has spent decades engaging in a “Western conquest strategy” with the ultimate aim of instituting Sharia in European nations.
Austria was explicitly cited in the report as a central region of operation for the Muslim Brotherhood, given its history as one of the “first lands of establishment of the movement” in Europe.
The French intelligence found that the effective fifth column operations engaged in by the Islamist group specifically aimed to use Western liberal values to further their aims, infiltrating EU and other government institutions to push concepts such as “Islamophobia” — a term coined by the Muslim Brotherhood.
This week, Brussels attempted to defend its decision to hand out more than €17 million ($20m) for Islamic-related projects, including research into Sharia and the supposed rise of Islamophobia in Europe through grants from the European Research Council (ERC).
This included €2.5 million ($2.9m) given to the French National Centre for Scientific Research to study the supposed evolution of Sharia and €2.3 million ($2.7m) provided to Bilgi University in Istanbul, Turkey, to track rising populist sentiment and Islamophobia in European countries, according to Euronews.
Italian MEP Silvia Sardone and French MEP Jean-Paul Garraud, both of the populist-right Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament, accused the Commission of wasting public funds and of demonstrating bias in favour of Islamic narratives.
EU Commissioner for research, Ekaterina Zaharieva, of the neo-liberal European People’s Party, defended the grants, claiming that they funded “world-class scholarly undertakings that advance the frontiers of knowledge” and said that the “sole criterion for funding is the scientific excellence of the proposal.”
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