On 13 March, human rights judges will deliver their judgement in a complaint against Austria brought by a Holocaust survivor.
The applicant, Martha Raviv, is an Austrian and Israeli national who lives in Petah-Tikva (Israel). Born in Vienna in 1936 to Jewish parents, she survived a concentration camp and emigrated to Israel in 1948, where she worked as a lawyer.
In 2002, she applied to the Austrian pension authorities to make use of the possibility of paying retroactive social security contributions at preferential rates and, consequently, to be entitled to an old-age-pension under the General Social Security Act.
Relying on Article 14 (prohibition of discrimination) and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 (protection of property) of the European Convention on Human Rights, she complains that the relevant provisions of the General Social Security Act, which did not treat periods of child-raising spent abroad on the same footing as such periods spent in Austria, discriminated against her.
