Civil and Human Rights
Most closely resembling a bill of rights in Austria is the Basic Law on the General Rights of Nationals of the Kingdoms and Länder represented in the Council of the Realm, a decree issued by Emperor Franz Josef on December 21, 1867 in response to pressure by liberal insurgents.
A very important part of Austria's canon of constitutional civil liberties thus originated as an imperatorial edict predating the current Constitution of Austria by roughly fifty years, the reason being that the framers of the Constitution in 1920 could not agree on a set of civil liberties to include in the constitution proper: as a lowest common denominator, they resorted to this Basic Law of 1867. Since then, other civil liberties have been set out in other constitutional laws, and Austria is party to the European Convention of Human Rights, which, too, has been implemented as a directly applicable constitutional law in Austria.
Given the fact that the Constitutional Court has begun to interpret the B-VG's equal treatment clause and other constitutional rights rather broadly since at least the early 1980s, civil rights are, as a general matter, relatively well protected.
Read more about this topic: Constitution Of Austria
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