Report by an employee of the SOVA Center at the round table "Tolerance and non-discrimination", held in Warsaw as part of the OSCE conference

From September 24 to October 6, 2012 in Warsaw takes place annual conference of the OSCE. October 3 expert Information and Analytical Center "SOVA" Olga Sibireva took part in the working session 14 - "Tolerance and non-discrimination II". We publish the text of the submitted report.

Dear chairman, dear participants of the conference!

In my presentation, I would like to highlight three issues which, as we can judge from the experience of Russia, arise in the sphere of countering racist crimes.

First of all, it must be stated that the concentration law enforcement efforts on the problem of hate crimes has given a very noticeable fruits: the level of racist violence from 2008 to 2011 in Russia decreased significantly. But in 2012, according to our data, it stopped declining. There are several reasons for this, I will point out only two of them.

Firstly, legislation, and partly public opinion, put racist speeches and racist crimes, hate speech and hate crimes. At the same time, with the development of Internet technologies, the number of racist speeches rose sharply. And law enforcement is tempted to pursue such speeches. After all, here you can always find a case that is easy investigate and prove in court, much easier than real violent crime. Although the public danger of many racist statements in the Internet is not so significant, at least in comparison with the real violence. As a result, this year in Russia for the first time the number of people convicted of hate propaganda was outnumbered by those convicted of racist violence.

Secondly, when registering crimes, there is still no a suspicion of a possible hate motive is registered. Therefore, in many cases where such a motive was present, it is not investigated. Arises impression that in many if not most of those cases where the motive of hatred was nevertheless investigated, this did not happen at the initiative of the ordinary police, but only due to the intervention of specialized anti-extremist units that monitor suspicious groups. Can to say that the investigation is conducted not “from the victim”, but “from the perpetrator”. Yes, this The system has already given good results, but their consolidation and development require stronger incentive mechanisms to investigate hate crimes.

There is also a third problem. We all agree that hate crime legislation does not target civil freedom. But there are many people who do not believe in it. And those cases when the legislation is applied with visible violations, they are already discrediting the existing positive experience of law enforcement and the legislation itself in the eyes of the citizens. When applying such politically sensitive laws it is especially important to comply with all procedural rules.

See also the recommendations of the SOVA Center.

Sources

• Inc. inf.