Abstract
The conduct of the country's foremost political leader was 'immoral', 'undignified', and amounted to 'the basest opportunism'. So wrote journalist Peter Michael Lingens about Bruno Kreisky, former Federal Chancellor of Austria. Thus started a long chain of litigation commencing with a private prosecution for criminal defamation in the Regional Court of Vienna in 1975, and culminating in a unanimous and forthright judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.