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Available. Persons residing outside of Austria must apply at the Austrian mission or consulate in their country of residence. Persons residing in Austria must apply to the Federal police in the larger cities or any mayor's office in the rural areas. Application forms entitled "Antrag auf Ausstellung einer Bescheinigung gemaess Paragraph 10 des Strafregistergesetzes" must be used. These forms may be obtained at any of the above Austrian offices. The applicant must apply in person and be able to prove his identity by a suitable document bearing the applicant's photograph. A certificate of Criminal Record (Bescheinigung ueber Verurteilungen) will be issued by the office where the application was filed after a search of the centralized records of the Federal Police Headquarters (Bundespolizeidirektion) in Vienna. However, such certificates will not be issued to persons who are wanted by the Austrian police in Austria or in any other Schengen country. Certified copies of court records of conviction (Urteilsabschrift) may be obtained directly from the court by the applicant or his legal representative upon presentation of a power of attorney. These records are available for a period of fifty years from the date of the conviction.
Convictions (except those resulting in a sentence of life imprisonment) are automatically expunged from the centralized penal records after the passage of the specified period of time; for less serious offenses, after five years and for more serious crimes, after 10 years. An act of clemency or a general amnesty may remove any conviction from the records. Convictions that have been removed from the records will not appear on the Certificate of Criminal Record. The removal of convictions from the records under Austrian law is not recognized for visa purposes, since the innocence of the convicted person is not a pre-condition for the removal.
NOTE: A Certificate of Criminal Record can only be obtained by the applicant himself. |
