The supervisory board said on Saturday that the director of SOS Children’s Villages, a global nonprofit that aids orphaned and abandoned children, had been suspended in response to claims of abuse at locations in Austria.
Christian Moser, the organization’s 17-year leader, has been removed of all responsibilities until an external audit is conducted.
Separately, Austrian authorities announced last week that they had opened an investigation into allegations of child abuse at a care facility operated by SOS Children’s Villages, an Austrian organization with 572 locations across more than 130 countries.
“The supervisory board believes that child protection, transparency and dealing with the facts are an absolute priority,” said Irene Szimak, chairwoman of the supervisory board of SOS Children’s Villages Austria.
Following the publication of an article by the weekly magazine Falter claiming that children had been mistreated at its Moosburg facility in southwestern Austria between 2008 and 2020, the charity announced on September 17 that it was initiating an external assessment of its operations.
Falter said that for years, kids and teens were abused, imprisoned, and photographed nude.
Despite a thorough internal inquiry in 2020, the alleged abuse was never made public.
Similar claims concerning the children’s villages at Seekirchen, next to Salzburg, and Imst, in Tyrol, have surfaced since the Falter study.
Prosecutors in Klagenfurt, Innsbruck and Salzburg are now investigating. Moser has, as yet, not reacted publicly to his suspension.
SOS Children’s Villages revealed in 2022 that a significant contributor had been connected to child sex abuse at one of their Asian centers.
The nonprofit organization announced last year that it was looking into allegations of fraud and abuse, especially sexual violence, that had occurred in about 20 of its operations in Asia and Africa starting in the 1990s.
*
Email *
Website
