Recommendations of SOVA Center to OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting

These recommendations were distributed on OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting, Warsaw, 2-13 October 2006

To OSCE:

1. Decide that OSCE member states must provide annual reports on hate crime and measures for counteracting it.

Develop a single minimum standard for hate crime monitoring and, accordingly, universal and comparable requirements for OSCE member countries' annual reporting on hate crime counteraction.

The OSCE Special Representatives on discrimination and xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia must play an active role in developing these standards and in promoting such monitoring in OSCE member counties.

1. Introduce a training programme for press officers of law enforcement and other government agencies to prevent their use of language derogatory towards certain ethnic and religious groups, or setting these groups against one another (similar to the ongoing training for police officers, a programme described above should be proactively developed as well).

2. Conduct expert consultations to develop minimum general principles of defining extremism and general approaches to counteracting extremism (taking into account that a legal definition of extremism already exists in some OSCE member counties).

To OSCE Member States:

Participate in the elaboration of a uniform OSCE hate crime monitoring programme.

To improve the system of hate crime and hate speech monitoring through better cooperation between Governments and NGOs. For this end:

• to charge some Government body to collect and arrange all the information on hate crime;

• to oblige law enforcement bodies to produce detailed answers to NGOs' inquiries on the matter;

• to oblige this body to consider the information produced by NGOs;

• to prepare yearly detailed statistical reports based on the OSCE proposed standards adjusting it with the NGOs actually contributing to data collection.

Sources:

• SOVA Center for Information and Analysis. Written recommendations // Human Dimension Implementation Meeting, Warsaw, 2-13 October 2006. (PDF)