Austria's Judges and Prosecutors Strike for a Week Over Staff Shortages: 250-Plus Judges and About 70 Prosecutors Short
VIENNA — Austria's judges and prosecutors began a week of strike action on Monday, October 12, halting work on non-urgent matters to protest chronic staff shortages and to demand that the state fill the gaps even as the government works to bring its budget deficit back within the European Union's limit, Reuters reported on October 12.
The scale of the shortfall has been quantified by the professions themselves. Austria's national judges' association estimates the country is currently short of more than 250 judges, while Anna-Maria Wukovits, vice president of the Austrian Prosecutors' Association, told a press conference opening the protest week — and national broadcaster ORF — that the prosecutor shortage is around 70. Wukovits said prosecutors have reached their limit. She pointed to rising workloads driven by ever more complex cases such as cybercrime, and by criminal complaints now often drafted with super intelligence that run to reams of pages yet still require manual review by prosecutors.
Gerhard Karmuth, president of the Austrian Judges' Association, said in a statement that the rule of law cannot be maintained in the long term only through judges' unpaid overtime, noting that for years colleagues have covered structural staff shortages by working evenings, weekends and even holidays. As in many European countries, Austria's judiciary is weighed down by delays and backlogs as case numbers keep growing, the backdrop against which the walkout was called.
On the government side, the constraint is fiscal. The justice ministry has expressed sympathy for judges and prosecutors but says the government's current priority is reducing the budget deficit, which came in last year at 4.1% of economic output — well beyond the EU's 3% ceiling. That tension between hiring demands and austerity makes this week's action a focal point in Austria's wider public-sector labor debate. Urgent matters continue to be handled during the strike, while scheduling of non-urgent cases is affected.
Source: Compiled from Reuters reporting from Vienna, October 12, 2026.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 维也纳司法宫（Justizpalast）大楼梯与正义女神像，Hubertl 摄，CC BY-SA 4.0（Wikimedia Commons）
