Putting hate crime on the agenda
OSCE/ODIHR’s new hate crime reporting website brings together data collected from 57 OSCE States into a user-friendly online resource, and aims to raise awareness about combatting this problem.
A migrant is attacked on the street. Neighbours subject a Roma family to repeated racial taunts. A pig’s head is left outside a mosque in one city; Jewish graves are desecrated in another. A church is vandalized. A pride march is disrupted. A transgender person is murdered.
On the face of it, all of these real-life crimes are unalike, affecting different groups of people.
However, what these crimes have in common is that they are motivated by bias. Victims and communities are attacked because of their membership, real or perceived, to a particular group based on ethnicity, nationality, religion, language, physical appearance, or sexual orientation, to name but a few.
It is only by looking at the crimes together and examining the biases that triggered them that government bodies and civil society become more effective in addressing these hate crimes and their causes.
The OSCE – and the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), in particular – has been at the forefront of international efforts to recognize and confront hate crime, identifying hate crimes as criminal offences committed with a bias motive. The OSCE officially began using the term in 2003 and three years later, ODIHR was tasked by its participating States to collect data on hate crime incidents. The importance of identifying crimes motivated by bias has continued to gain wider regional and international recognition since then.
Hate crime affects us all
ODIHR’s work addressing hate crime is grounded in the OSCE’s long-standing and comprehensive commitments to tolerance and non-discrimination. Seeing hate crime as a larger, region-wide phenomenon helps address a whole range of crimes, bringing together different strands of targeted violence in order to develop multi-country policies that can prevent divisions and cycles of retaliation taking root in societies.
Reporting to raise awareness
Every year, ODIHR compiles the “Hate Crimes in the OSCE Region – Incidents and responses” report providing data about the extent and types of hate crimes in the OSCE region, including information about the bias motivation for these crimes, developments in legislation and responses by governments and civil society.
This landmark report has already become an important resource for national authorities, law enforcement and civil society, but with the launch of the report on a new online platform - the Hate Crime Reporting website – ODIHR is aiming to raise awareness about hate crimes among a much wider audience.
"The idea is to guide website visitors to the material that they are seeking without making them jump through too many hoops," explains Floriane Hohenberg, Head of the Tolerance and Non-discrimination department at ODIHR. "The website divides hate crime data collected from various sources across the OSCE region into digestible chunks of information that are country- and issue-specific."
Promoting understanding
The website is an interactive resource for anyone wanting the latest information on hate crimes and efforts to combat this problem in the OSCE’s 57 participating States. Covering data from 2009 onwards, the resource will be updated every year.
The quality of reporting from states and civil society has increased since ODIHR published its first annual report on hate crimes. “The purpose of hate crime data collection is not simply about identifying trends and saying whether hate crime is going up or down,” says ODIHR Hate Crime Officer Joanna Perry.
“When we see a state with a comprehensive reporting structure, including hate crimes figures disaggregated by bias motivation, we can be more confident that hate crime is treated as a serious problem by that country. It also reassures affected groups and sends a strong message to offenders that this type of action against a community will not be tolerated,” she says.
Indeed, hate crimes, because of their deep and polarizing impact on communities, can pose a threat to the security and stability of entire countries and to the region itself if left unaddressed.
“People ask me all the time: Why is someone being assaulted because of their race or religion philosophically different from being assaulted in a barroom fight?” says Danuta Głowacka-Mazur, Director of the Department of Control, Complaints and Petitions at Poland’s Interior Ministry. “They don’t understand that this can become a threat to everyone’s security – a threat that the OSCE has an obligation to address and to counter.”
“If the new website can eliminate confusion and prompt ordinary citizens to educate others, then that can only be a good thing.