Parliamentary Committees of Inquiry in Austria

• Department of Law

The EUI Constitutionalism and Politics Working Group hosts a presentation by Kevin Hinterberger, Visiting Fellow at EUI Law Department.

Kevin Hinterberger is a research assistant on Asylum and Migration Law in the Austrian Federal Chamber of Labour and a reconstitution Fellow 2021/22. His reconstitution Fellowship allowed him to spend an administrative internship at the Austrian Constitutional Court in the office of the President Professor Grabenwarter. Currently, he is a Visiting Fellow at the Law Department of Law of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. His reconstitution project at EUI deals with parliamentary committees of enquiry.

Abstract 

Characteristically, Parliamentary Committees of Inquiry (PCIs) are set up by the respective Parliament to hold executive actors politically accountable. Austria is a representative example as a PCI deals currently with highly charged issues and has investigated the Ibiza affair that led to the fall of the conservative-far-right ÖVP-FPÖ government in 2019.This presentation will discuss the fundamental reform of the law on PCIs in 2015, the effectiveness of PCIs in Austria and ask whether the reform has led to shifts in the relationship of the state functions to each other or will do so in the medium term.