Administrative Justice in Austria in the Stage of Transition: From Administrative Appeals to Administrative Courts or the Final Stage of “Tribunalization” of Administrative Disputes

Abstract

The Austrian system of administrative justice is right now undergoing a vast reform process, with effects that are still difficult to assess. In these circumstances, the report on Austria describes briefly the reform as it was defined by the Government and tries to identify the consequences of ADR tools. Under the hitherto existing system in Austria, review of administrative decisions was normally assured by administrative appeals to higher ranked authorities. In the end, legal subjects had access to the Constitutional Court (Verfassungsgerichtshof) or the supreme Administrative Court (Verwaltungsgerichtshof). Compliance with the European Human Rights Convention (EHRC), however, has forced Austria to establish, during the last decades, more than 100 independent administrative tribunals. And since the 1980s of the last century, the supreme Administrative Court has permanently been congested with pending complaints, which to settle took, therefore, more often than not too long. The reform (effective on January 1st 2014) implements the so-called 9 + 2 model: one Federal Administrative Court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht), one Federal Fiscal Court (Bundesfinanzgericht), and nine Administrative Courts in the federal states (Landesverwaltungsgerichte) serve now as administrative courts of first instance, under (limited) review done by the supreme Administrative Court and the Constitutional Court. An explicit corollary of the reform is the abolishment of administrative appeals; legislation will, however, be still allowed to provide them for certain areas—e.g., for municipal building procedures. What is more, existing supervisory procedures of reconsideration by the issuing authority itself or by its superior authority could gain more relevance in the future.