State Recognition of Religious Societies in Austria

Austria's 1874 Recognition Act, still in force with amendments, establishes a formal legal category of state-recognized religious society, granting recognized bodies rights including religious education in public schools, tax collection privileges and corporate legal status, a framework the Catholic Church holds automatically under a 1934 concordat while other communities, including Austria's small but growing Muslim population, mostly of Turkish and Bosnian descent from postwar labor migration, gained recognition later, Islam specifically under a distinct 1912 Islam Law originally passed to govern Bosnian Muslim soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army. A controversial 2015 revision of that Islam Law banned foreign funding of Muslim organizations and mosques, a measure the government justified as countering foreign political influence and critics characterized as discriminatory relative to other recognized religions not subject to equivalent restriction.

Austria's Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientology have both sought and been denied full recognized-society status, remaining instead in a lesser legal category, and the country's small Jewish community, represented by the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, receives state security funding following antisemitic attacks in recent decades.