Verleumdung in Austria: § 297 StGB False Accusation Explained

Anyone searching "verleumdung" while living in or dealing with Austria usually expects to find Austria's law on damaging someone's reputation. That expectation is the trap. § 297 of the Austrian Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB), titled "Verleumdung," is not a reputational defamation offence at all. It punishes knowingly reporting someone falsely for a crime they did not commit, exposing that person to the risk of a police or prosecutorial investigation.

This is the single most confused legal term between Germany and Austria. In Germany, "Verleumdung" (§ 187 of the German Criminal Code) is the top tier of the reputational honour offences, close in substance to Austria's own § 111 StGB üble Nachrede. In Austria, "Verleumdung" means something else entirely: a false criminal report made with actual knowledge that it is false. Getting the two mixed up leads people to the wrong statute, the wrong penalty range and the wrong procedure.

This page sets out what § 297 StGB actually requires, how its two penalty tiers work, why it is prosecuted by the state rather than by the person accused, and how it relates to the honour offences and to a media outlet's own civil liability under the Mediengesetz.

Information last verified on 22 July 2026. This page provides general legal information about Austrian law and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

What § 297 StGB Actually Punishes

§ 297 Abs 1 StGB punishes a person who exposes someone else to the danger of a state investigation by falsely accusing them, either of an offence that is prosecuted ex officio, or of a breach of an official or professional duty. The key phrase in the statute is "der Gefahr einer behördlichen Verfolgung," the danger of official prosecution. The harm the law protects is not the victim's reputation. It is the administration of justice, and the victim's freedom from being dragged into a wrongful state investigation.

That is why § 297 sits among the offences against the administration of justice in the StGB, not inside the honour chapter that runs from § 111 to § 117. A false claim that someone is lazy, dishonest or immoral is a matter for the honour offences described further below. A false claim to the police, a regulator, or an employer's disciplinary body that someone committed a specific crime or broke a specific professional rule, made knowing that claim is false, is Verleumdung.

The Wissentlichkeit Requirement: Why Knowledge of Falsity Is Everything

§ 297 only applies "wenn er weiß (§ 5 Abs 3), dass die Verdächtigung falsch ist," when the accuser knows, in the sense defined by § 5 Abs 3 StGB, that the accusation is false. Wissentlichkeit is the highest grade of criminal intent in Austrian law, above ordinary intent (Vorsatz) and well above dolus eventualis, the lower standard of merely accepting a risk as possible.

This single requirement is what separates a genuinely criminal false report from an honest mistake, an exaggeration, or a report made in good faith that later turns out to be wrong. Someone who genuinely, even if unreasonably, believes their accusation is true has not committed Verleumdung, whatever else they may be liable for. The prosecution has to prove actual knowledge of falsity, not merely that the accusation was objectively untrue.

Austria vs Germany: Same Word, Two Different Crimes

This is the point that trips up the most readers, and the reason this page exists. Both Austrian and German law use the word "Verleumdung," and they do not mean the same thing.

• Austria, § 297 StGB: Verleumdung is a knowingly false accusation that someone committed a crime or breached an official or professional duty, exposing them to the danger of a state investigation. The protected interest is the administration of justice.
• Germany, § 187 dStGB: Verleumdung is asserting or spreading, against one's own better knowledge, an untrue fact about someone that is apt to make them contemptible, lower them in public opinion, or endanger their creditworthiness. The base penalty there is up to two years in prison or a fine, rising to up to five years where the statement is made publicly, at an assembly, or through distributed material. This is a reputational honour offence, not a false criminal report.

Austria's own equivalent of the German reputational offence is not § 297 at all. It is § 111 StGB üble Nachrede, discussed below. So an English-speaking reader translating "Verleumdung" and expecting German-style reputational defamation law will land on the wrong Austrian statute if they stop at § 297. This is the single most common error on this topic, and it matters because the penalty ranges, the truth defence, and who prosecutes the case are all different between the two Austrian offences.

The Two Penalty Tiers Under § 297 Abs 1

Both penalty tiers for Verleumdung are written into a single sentence in § 297 Abs 1. There is no separate "Abs 2 penalty," a mistake that appears surprisingly often in secondary summaries of this offence. Abs 2 deals with voluntary withdrawal, covered in the next section, not with a harsher sentence.

The aggravated tier does not depend on how serious the false accusation feels. It depends on a mechanical test: what sentence does the offence the accuser falsely imputed actually carry? If someone knowingly and falsely reports another person for an offence that itself is punishable by more than one year in prison, the case moves into the aggravated range automatically, even if no investigation ever resulted in an actual charge.

Worked example. An Austrian fine under this system is calculated in Tagessätze, daily units set by a court based on the convicted person's net income, not a flat sum. If a court were to set the daily rate at 50 euros for a base-tier case, the maximum fine under the 720-Tagessatz ceiling would be 36,000 euros, before any prison term is even considered as an alternative. The aggravated tier removes the fine option altogether and moves straight to a prison range of six months to five years, reflecting how much more serious the underlying accusation was.

Tätige Reue: Withdrawing Before the Authorities Act

§ 297 Abs 2 StGB removes punishment entirely for someone who voluntarily eliminates the danger of a state investigation before any authority has taken action to pursue the falsely accused person. This is tätige Reue, active repentance, a recognised concept across several Austrian offences, not a second, harsher version of Verleumdung.

In practice this means a person who realises their false report was wrong, and retracts it to the police or the relevant authority before any investigative step has been taken against the person they accused, is not punished under § 297 at all. Once an authority has already started acting on the false report, this route closes.

Prosecution: An Offizialdelikt, Not a Private Prosecution

Verleumdung is prosecuted ex officio by the public prosecutor's office (Staatsanwaltschaft), an Offizialdelikt. This follows from where the offence sits in the StGB: § 297 protects the administration of justice, not personal honour, so it falls outside the group of honour offences in §§ 111 to 117 that require the injured person to bring a private prosecution (Privatanklage) under § 117 Abs 1 StGB.

That structural placement is also the practical punchline of the AT/DE comparison. Knowingly reporting someone to the police for a crime they did not commit is treated as an attack on the state's own justice system, prosecuted by the state itself and carrying up to five years in the aggravated case. Damaging someone's reputation under § 111 üble Nachrede, by contrast, is something the victim ordinarily has to pursue privately, at their own initiative and expense.

Verleumdung vs Üble Nachrede: Sibling Offences, Different Chapters

Because the two Austrian offences sit so close together in ordinary conversation, it helps to see them side by side. For a fuller treatment of § 111 and the wider honour chapter, see defamation and honour law in Austria.

Two related offences fill in the rest of the honour chapter. § 115 StGB Beleidigung covers a public insult, meaning conduct in front of more than two other people, and does not require a factual accusation the way § 111 does. § 113 StGB punishes reproaching someone, in a way a third party could perceive, with a criminal offence for which the punishment has already been served or conditionally remitted, protecting a rehabilitated person from having an old, settled matter thrown back at them. A related but separate offence, § 152 StGB Kreditschädigung, punishes asserting untrue facts that damage or endanger another person's credit, earnings or professional advancement, and is understood to protect businesses as well as individuals, prosecuted only on the victim's request.

Civil Compensation From the Media: §§ 6 and 8 Mediengesetz

A separate and often more practical route exists against a newspaper, broadcaster or website, rather than against the individual author. § 6 Mediengesetz (MedienG) gives the person affected a direct civil compensation claim against the Medieninhaber, the media owner, whenever a publication fulfils the objective elements of üble Nachrede, Beschimpfung, Verspottung or Verleumdung. Only the objective elements need to be established, not the individual journalist's personal guilt, which is what makes this claim workable against a media company rather than only against a named author.

§ 6 Abs 2 sets out exclusions: a truthful account of a public parliamentary session, publications that are true, and cases where there was an overriding public interest and journalistic diligence gave sufficient grounds to believe the statement was true, among others.

The amount of compensation is governed by § 8 Abs 1 MedienG, in force since 1 January 2021, which sets a single cap schedule shared across §§ 6, 7, 7a, 7b and 7c. The compensation amount must be set at a minimum of 100 euros, and may not exceed 40,000 euros, except under §§ 6, 7 or 7c, where particularly serious effects of the publication combine with gross negligence or intent by the media owner or staff, in which case the ceiling rises to 100,000 euros. Older sources quoting caps of 20,000 or 50,000 euros describe the pre-2021 version of the Mediengesetz and are no longer current.

Worked example. A website knowingly and falsely reports that a named private individual committed a specific serious crime, in circumstances that meet the objective elements of Verleumdung under § 6. If the effects on that person are not found to be particularly serious, or gross negligence or intent by the site's operator is not established, the claim is capped at 40,000 euros. If the publication caused particularly serious harm and the operator acted with gross negligence or intent, the ceiling rises to 100,000 euros. Either figure is a ceiling the court may award up to, not a guaranteed sum, and an award under § 8 Abs 4 carries a 14-day payment deadline once it becomes enforceable.