Building a Comprehensive Criminal Justice Response to Hate Crime

Effectively countering hate crime requires the co-ordination of work by various criminal justice actors – police officers, lawyers, prosecutors and judges – as well as with the victims of such crimes. Close co-operation among these different actors, based on a deep understanding of hate crime issues, is crucial for these efforts to be effective. With this in mind, in February 2017 the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) launched a two-year project to help improve the skills of and collaboration among criminal justice professionals within each of four OSCE countries – Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Poland – and to improve their co-operation with civil society, to contribute to the building of a comprehensive criminal justice response to hate crime in each of these countries.

In Bulgaria, for example, the project will focus on the development of joint training programmes for police and prosecutors, allowing them to identify and overcome differences in their respective understandings of hate crimes and in their approaches to processing hate crime cases.

In Greece, work will focus on the development of a national, cross-governmental protocol on activities and policies to be implemented by relevant authorities to address hate crime, and on improving the common police-prosecutor database of hate crimes, to help co-ordinate institutional responses to such crimes in the country.

The focus in Italy will be on training police officers, prosecutors, judges, lawyers and civil society groups working with hate crime victims on a regional level in Lombardy as well as analysing data on hate crimes collected by the court of Milan.

The project will also design an innovative methodology for mapping hate crimes by conducting a victimization survey in Poland, focusing on small communities, to extract data on “invisible” hate crimes.

The outcomes and experiences of these activities will be presented and discussed at national workshops and will contribute to the development of toolkits, including training packages, methodologies and guidelines on the topic of hate crime. The final products will be presented and shared among practitioners and policymakers at a large-scale conference in November 2018 and will become valuable resources in addressing hate crimes for actors in criminal justice systems across the OSCE region.