Qualitative Improvement of Counteraction to Hate Crime and Hate Propaganda

*In September 2005 SOVA took part in OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting in Warsaw.

On September, 28th at the working session "Tolerance and non-discrimination" ("Prevention of aggressive nationalism, chauvinism, and ethnic cleansing") Galina Kozhevnikova made the application for the situation with counteraction to radical nationalism in Russia and possible steps on improvement of this activity in Russia and in the OSCE region.*

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen

Before turning to recommendations for the OSCE countries and the OSCE as a whole we must express our concern about steady decline of the level of ethnic and religious tolerance in Russia. The number of hate-motivated attacks increases and sociologists state a general growth of xenophobia. Hate propaganda is again being stepped up, especially the anti-Semitic one that serves as an ideological basis for many other manifestaions of hate. And while violent crime encounter an opposition on the part of the law-enforcing system, the propaganda of anti-Semitism and other forms of hate is carried out practically with impunity.

Hate crime and hate propaganda are becoming an ever increasing threat in the OSCE region. Shortcomings in the law-enforcing agencies' counteraction to them cause a natural aspiration for a modification and frequently a toughening of the legislation in this sphere. But it is the insufficient fexibility, not the excessive softness, that is the fault of national legislations. For example, only one sanction exists against mass media instigating hate or enmity - the closure of the publication. The lack of softer punishment options - fines, for instance, - hardly helps an efficient persecution of such abuses of the freedom of expression. Any national legislation should provide the courts with a wide enough spectrum of sanctions against hate speech.

But most importantly the law-enforcing agencies and the courts do not use the already existing legislation effectively enough. In this connection one should welcome the OSCE program created according to the decision of Sofia Ministerial for special training of the staff of the law-enforcing agencies to combat hate crime. We ask the Conference to include in the final document a call for all countries to send the staff of their law-enforcing agencies to these training cources.

Nobody denies the importance of such work as monitoring of hate crime and hate propaganda incidents. The Cordoba Declaration ended with the appeal to strengthen the interaction of the states with the NGOs in this sphere. But it is obvious that the monitoring mechanism including the part concerning the interaction with the NGOs is still deficient.

We propose a general scheme of state-NGO interaction. It includes establishing a state institution with the responsibility for the monitoring in this sphere; mutual obligations between a state and an NGO regarding the information exchange; drafting of an annual report based on the OSCE proposed standards by the above-mentioned institution in collaboration with the NGOs that participated in the monitoring. Realization of such scheme will make it possible to turn the monitoring work into a joint project of the OSCE, the governments and the NGOs.

The practice of law-application as concerns the hate crime and hate propaganda shows that the investigators and the courts constantly encounter significant difficulties when qualifying the acts committed. Clarifications by the supreme national judicial instances cannot always be helpful here and they are not always given. On the other hand, the number of the verdicts on that kind of cases is not numerous. They create de facto a valuable precedent base, but these precedents are no used sufficiently.

We propose in the spirit of the Maastricht Ministerial decisions to create the national databases on both guilty and not-guilty verdicts concerning cases of hate crime and cases of hate propaganda, with the database containing detailed description of the incidents themselves (and, as concerns the hate propaganda cases - with incriminated text included). An integration of the national databases on the OSCE scale is possible at the next stage. Undoubtedly, the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights should be added to such database.

The existence of such common factological base will facilitate in our societies the formation of a more sustainable and clear notion as to which kind of actions caused by intolerant santiments are criminal, which of them deserve administrative sanctions and which should be subject to moral reprimands only.

Despite all the diversity of approaches which exist in different countries, that will promote the work to bring closer to each other the legal norms in the sphere of restrictions on manifestations of intolerance and prevention of hate crime.

**SOVA Center for Information and Analysis

International League for Human Rights**