Hate Speech, Information Disorder, and Conflict
Sahana Udupa, Iginio Gagliardone, Alexandra Deem, Laura Csuka · 2020
acting on behalf of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights is responsible for the use that might be made of the following information.Across the European Union, people still face hatred because of their skin colour, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexuality -despite various efforts by the EU and its Member States to tackle this problem.Laws against hate crime are in place, imposing increased penalties for bias motivation, and diverse services are available for victims.Are these measures enough?There are two major catches.Only a fraction of victims report hate-motivated harassment and violence to the police.Moreover, even when they do, police officers do not always flag them as hate crimes.Some may not recognise certain incidents as stemming from prejudice.Others may simply lack the necessary practical tools, such as incident reporting forms, that allow racist motivation to be noted -or the inclination to provide information not always deemed obligatory.This means these hate crimes remain unidentified or unrecorded -and thus un-investigated, unprosecuted, uncounted and, ultimately, invisible.The ramifications are multi-layered and mutually reinforcing.Law enforcement and policymakers may underestimate the scale and nature of the problem.As a result, measures to prevent and curtail it, and to support victims, may fall short.Individuals left without redress -as well as their loved ones and even communities as a wholewill feel little faith in a system that fails to adequately address their plight, further discouraging reporting.Social cohesion, too, can suffer.Encouragingly, initiatives to counter this troubling cycle are gaining momentum.They include producing relevant guidance for police officers; requiring the collection of detailed and disaggregated data on crime, rendering visible that motivated by bias; and working with civil society organisations experienced in dealing with hate crime.This report adds to the momentum by providing rich and detailed information on hate crime recording and data collection systems across the EU, including any systemic cooperation with civil society.It can support efforts to strengthen recording and data collection as well as capacity-building activities to counter hate crime -essential elements of effectively combating prejudice, supporting victims and fostering inclusive societies.We would like to express our gratitude to the members of the Subgroup on methodologies for recording and collecting data on hate crime -this report would not have been possible without their contributions.