For a man who lost a lawsuit and 57,000 euros a few minutes ago, Peter Pilz seems very calm. Maybe because it’s not his first defeat in court. Besides, he is already retired, says the political veteran and former MP for the Greens and his Pilz list. “I’m certainly not a broken man now.” But he doesn’t agree at all with the verdict that Judge Daniel Potmesil made this Thursday afternoon in the Vienna Regional Court for Criminal Matters. His book The Death of the section chief over the death of the powerful judicial officer Christian Pilnacek is to be confiscated, and his publisher Zack Media is also to pay damages to a total of four police officers who had sued for “slander”. Rightly so, as the judge found.
Pilz, on the other hand, senses “political censorship” and will appeal. Not even his lawyer knows exactly what the confiscation of the book means; the remaining copies will probably only be taken out of circulation with a final judgment in the next instance. In any case, Pilz recommends with a wink that you quickly get another copy. He is already working on a successor, and in his closing speech he teased the content for everyone present. He says he will not let the ruling influence his work. Pilz is, if you will, a man of conviction.
In The death of the section chief he writes about inconsistencies in the investigation into the Pilnacek case. The section head in the Ministry of Justice, who was suspended from office at the time, was found dead in a branch of the Danube in Rossatz, Lower Austria, in the early morning of October 20, 2023. Suicide, that’s the official version. A story that Pilnacek’s partner Karin Wurm didn’t want to believe. Pilz took notice and began to research.
He finally published his research in February of this year. To date, the book has found around 14,000 buyers, a bestseller by Austrian standards, the most explosive investigative book in recent years, and also the trigger for a parliamentary committee of inquiry and an examination by the Eisenstadt public prosecutor’s office to determine whether the investigation into Pilnacek’s death should be reopened. So mushroom did not miss its effect. The only question today was whether he didn’t go a step too far. The judge has no doubts about that.
The proof of truth is missing
Nevertheless: Having a book confiscated – he wasn’t happy with it, says Judge Potmesil at the end of the long day of proceedings in room 303. “But the law is clear.” To make the decision, he actually only had to read the book, after which it was clear to him: the charge of “slander” was true.
In fact, Pilz is not content with simply stringing together facts. As a member of parliament for the Greens in the 1980s and later with his own list, he made a name for himself as an exposer. Committees of inquiry were his playing field, from Noricum to Eurofighter, some of which resulted in gigantic court cases. But he was and is also known for his penchant for grand narratives. “Now something interesting has happened,” is how he likes to begin his stories.
His book about the Pilnacek case culminates in the thesis that individual police officers from Federal Police Director Michael Takacs downwards acted as a “cleaning squad” for the ÖVP. In the interests of the People’s Party, they deliberately squandered the investigation in order to conceal the true cause of death and to obtain Pilnacek’s data carriers, on which quite a few people in political Vienna suspect that there are a few dark state secrets. “I didn’t want to present a puzzle,” says Pilz, “if I just put together 1,000 facts, no one can understand that.” He sees the process as a slap lawsuit, short for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.” A practice that UNESCO recently warned against: journalists around the world are using legal means to deter sensitive research.
A trend that is also evident in Austria: In June 2022, the satirist Florian Scheuba was sued by the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office, Andreas Holzer. Scheuba had in his satirical column Standard written about Holzer’s “mysterious inaction” in an investigation against Heinz-Christian Strache. A first trial had ended in an acquittal, but the judges in the higher courts interpreted Scheuba’s text as an allegation of abuse of office, and the verdict here was also “slander.”
In his verdict, Judge Potmesil said the obvious investigative mishaps policeHe didn’t like it at all either, which he read about in the book and now heard about in court. Nevertheless, the plaintiffs should not allow themselves to be accused of having acted on behalf of or in the interests of the ÖVP. He found 41 such passages. “The reader reads it like this,” said Potmesil. However, Pilz was unable to provide proof of the truth of his thesis.
