The Austrian government is set to pay tens of millions of euros in compensation to gay people who were persecuted or convicted of consensual homosexual acts. The new legislation would apply to anyone convicted under specific sections of Austria’s legal code that were put in place after homosexuality was decriminalised in 1971. These special paragraphs convicted gay people of acts that would have been legal if they were straight. The last of these provisions was only repealed by the Constitutional Court in 2002. “The prosecution of homosexual people was a dark chapter of the Second Republic (government post-1945) and a great injustice,” Austria’s Justice Minister Alma Zadić posted on X, formerly Twitter.