Austria ends cooperation with deradicalisation group Derad
The Austrian federal government has ended its cooperation with Derad, the association that has carried out deradicalisation work in Austrian prisons and for the courts since 2015. The interior ministry confirmed the decision, and the City of Vienna has suspended its own cooperation until the matter is clarified. The stated reason is an assessment by the state protection service that several leading figures in the association show a proximity to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. There are no criminal allegations against the association or anyone in it.
Derad rejects the assessment completely. Its co-founder and chairman, Moussa Al-Hassan Diaw, told the Austrian news agency that the suggestion of Muslim Brotherhood links was "complete nonsense", adding that the association had consistently warned about the Muslim Brotherhood and had run training sessions for the state protection authorities themselves.
The practical question is what happens to the people in the programme. Derad currently works with around 200 current and former Islamists, some of whom have been in its care for ten years, and roughly 800 people have passed through the programme in total. The state protection service accepts that the work has succeeded to a degree in moving people away from jihadism, but argues that participants end up as fundamentalist rather than liberal Muslims, and that is the reasoning behind withdrawing the contracts. No replacement provider has been named.
For Muslim readers in Austria this is worth reading carefully rather than through the headlines. It is an administrative decision to stop buying a service, taken on an intelligence assessment, not a court finding, and the organisation concerned denies it and has not been charged with anything. If you or a family member is currently receiving support through Derad, whether in prison, after release or as a court-ordered condition, contact the responsible court, probation service or the Vienna child and youth services office directly to ask who will take over the case, and get that answer in writing. Court-ordered conditions do not lapse because the provider changes, and a gap in supervision is something you want documented rather than discovered later.