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A Brief Note from the New Editors

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Welcome to Volume 51, Issue 1-the first issue edited by our binational, cross-disciplinary team. We would like to begin this issue by thanking the outgoing editors, by introducing ourselves, and by offering a brief overview of important editorial principles for our team.The journal comes to us after excellent editing work by Tim Johnson and Joachim Savelsberg. Tim and Joachim continue to share great advice for the transition, and have prepared us well to deal with the many issues that arise day-to-day in the job of editing a journal. Tim and Joachim's three-year tenure at Law & Society Review saw the publication of many wonderful articles and issues, including the 50th anniversary issue celebrating LSR's golden anniversary. The LSR's continuing high impact factor is compelling evidence of Tim and Joachim's careful stewardship. Although any new editorship team necessarily involves transition, we will continue many long-standing practices. We continue to look for top quality, innovative scholarship to publish, and to provide effective and full reviewer response to the manuscripts submitted to us. But our new team brings a unique sense of energy and perspective stemming from the team's structure. We are the first team that is a triad-three scholars at three separate institutions (Indiana University, Virginia Tech, University of British Colombia), two located in different areas of the United States, and one in Canada. We represent different perspectives and history in the field and in our profession. Two of us are political scientists, two of us teach in law schools as interdisciplinary legal scholars, one of us teaches in a public policy school. We hope that these three different sites of editorial leadership allow us to contribute to the work our predecessors have done broadening LSR's reach.As scholars, one of our common points is an interest in how individuals respond to the construction by law of subject positions. Canadian legal scholars have been particularly engaged in exploring indigenous legal questions and Margot Young brings a commitment to that expansion of law and society coverage, along with feminist and social justice expertise. Jeannine Bell has long worked on the intersecting issues of law, crime, and racial injustice with scholarship that is focused on hate crime, hate speech, and policing, and how these concerns affect the lives of racial minorities in the United States. Susan Sterett has worked on multilevel analyses of crafting social welfare and other membership claims by race and gender, working both from appellate courts cases and from interview data to analyze those who organize claims and those who make individual claims. In our work we use a range of approaches to data collection, ranging from ethnography to analysis of survey data.Even though our work touches on many different areas in socio-legal research, we recognize the need for assistance from specialists in areas with which we are less familiar. We have assembled a team of associate editors and advisory board members who capture a broad array of socio-legal scholarship across the globe. Our advisory board includes sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and legal scholars, who teach in variety of departments in the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Their names and institutional affiliations are listed in the front pages. …

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  • 10.7816/nesne-09-22-11
Analysis of Hate Speech and Hate Crimes From A Social Psychological Perspective: A Review
  • Dec 31, 2021
  • Nesne Psikoloji Dergisi

Hate crime and hate speech are extreme examples of negative intergroup relations. It is thought that it would be very useful to analyze the variables that lead up to for dealing with hate speech and crimes that have many physical and psychological destructive consequences for the exposed group members. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to address some of the social psychological variables associated with hate speech and hate crimes and to suggest solutions to reduce hate speech and hate crimes in this context. For this purpose, first of all, hate speech and hate crimes were defined and various examples were presented in this direction. Later, hate crimes and hate speech were examined in terms of social identity identification, social dominance orientation, system justification, realistic and symbolic threat perception, frustration and scapegoat concepts. The relationship between hate speech and crimes of this concept has been embodied with research findings and examples from various regions in Turkey and the world. Finally, some solution suggestions have been presented by making use of this theoretical knowledge in terms of combating hate crimes and hate speeches. Keywords: Hate crime, hate speech, intergroup relations, social psychology

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  • 10.1002/cl2.1228
PROTOCOL: Mapping the scientific knowledge and approaches to defining and measuring hate crime, hate speech, and hate incidents
  • Apr 18, 2022
  • Campbell Systematic Reviews
  • Matteo Vergani + 5 more

The overallaim of the review is to map the definitions and measurement tools used to capture the whole spectrum of hate motivated behaviors, including hate crime, hate speech and hate incidents. This will benefit the field of hate studies by providing a baseline that can inform the building of cumulative knowledge and comparative research. The first review objective is to map definitions of hate crime, hate incidents, hate speech, and surrogate terms. Specific research questions underpinning this objective are: (a) How are hate crimes, hate speech and hate incidents defined in the academic, legal, policy, and programming literature?; (b) What are the concepts, parameters and criteria that qualify a behavior as being hate crime, hate incident or hate speech?; and (c) What are the most common concepts, parameters and criteria found across definitions? What are the differences between definitions and the elements they contain? The second review objective is to map the tools used to measure the prevalence of hate crime, hate incidents, hate speech, and surrogate terms. Specific research questions underpinning this objective are: (a) How are definitions operationalised to measure hate crimes, hate speech, and hate incidents?; and (b) How valid and reliable are these measures?

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HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen
  • Jan 1, 2019
  • Human Rights Quarterly
  • Richard Ashby Wilson

Reviewed by: HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen Richard Ashby Wilson (bio) Nadine Strossen, HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018), ISBN: 9780190859121, 232 pages. Hate is trending. The sitting president of the United States regularly mobilizes his political constituency by vilifying Mexican immigrants as “criminals and rapists” who “infest” America, and by promoting a “zero tolerance” policy at the border that punitively separates children from their parents, including persons applying for asylum. There has been a resurgence in white nationalist ideology globally both in mainstream electoral politics and in ugly scenes on the streets of Charlottesville, Dresden, and Warsaw. In the United Kingdom, hate crimes spiked after the Brexit referendum and in the USA, there has been a steady rise in hate crimes against African-Americans, Muslims, immigrants and members of the LGBT community. Given this current paroxysm of populism, isn’t it high time we re-evaluated our commitment to freedom of expression and start contemplating new legislation to regulate discriminatory speech that targets vulnerable minorities? In HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship, Nadine Strossen, former national President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), offers a resounding defense of free speech and rejects attempts to suppress or ban speech that is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. Free speech is the lifeblood of democratic deliberation, argues Strossen, and much hate speech in the United States, while offensive, is protected speech and should remain so. Current US law only suppresses speech that intentionally advocates imminent lawless action that is likely to occur, and even then, the regulation of speech must occur in a way that is consistent with the viewpoint (or content) neutrality principle which inhibits the state from disfavoring some opinions simply because they are disagreeable. Strossen starts with the observation that there is no clear and consistent definition of “hate speech,” which she puts in scare quotations throughout the book. Hate speech is not a term of legal art and it is simply wrong to assert, as some liberal politicians have, that “hate speech is not free speech.” In Strossen’s view, “the terms ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crimes’ are simply deployed to demonize views people find offensive and to call for punishing a broad swathe of expression, including political discourse that is integral to our democracy.”1 Reviewing hate speech laws in the US and globally, Strossen concludes that it is simply not possible to draft hate speech laws that are not unduly vague, overbroad and counter-productive.2 Germany, France, and other European countries convict hundreds of defendants a year for offences as capacious as “incitement to hatred,” and Strossen documents a number of cases that seem disproportionately chilling of political [End Page 213] speech. They include the 2014 arrest of a British politician for publicly reading a Winston Churchill quote from 1899 that denounced the treatment of women in Muslim countries, and the conviction of a Danish man in 2016 who criticized “the ideology of Islam” on Facebook, and posted the statement, “Islam wants to abuse democracy in order to get rid of democracy.”3 She reminds us also of the long and repressive history of government censorship in the United States, including how, in the 1830s, Southern states banned abolitionist speech on the grounds that it had the potential to incite violence and rebellion. She observes that the Republican National Committee and some state legislatures have included the Black Lives Matter movement in resolutions condemning hate speech. HATE addresses the lively and fairly acrimonious campus hate speech debate currently taking place in the United States, and Strossen counsels faculty and students to confront provocative speakers at universities with “counterspeech” and vigorous opposing arguments, rather than to silence them with heckling and censorious campus hate speech codes.4 She points out that all the campus speech codes challenged in the courts by the ACLU have been struck down on First Amendment grounds and recommends that universities permit all speech that the government does not itself censor.5 Strossen does not countenance the view that merely being exposed to denigrating speech is in...

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  • 10.1353/jjs.2022.0048
Hate Speech in Japan: The Possibility of a Non-Regulatory Approach ed. by Shinji Higaki and Yuji Nasu
  • Jun 1, 2022
  • The Journal of Japanese Studies
  • Celeste L Arrington

Reviewed by: Hate Speech in Japan: The Possibility of a Non-Regulatory Approach ed. by Shinji Higaki and Yuji Nasu Celeste L. Arrington (bio) Hate Speech in Japan: The Possibility of a Non-Regulatory Approach. Edited by Shinji Higaki and Yuji Nasu. Cambridge University Press, 2021. xviii, 506 pages. $125.00, cloth; $100.00, E-book. Hate Speech in Japan is an information-packed new book about a significant recent development in Japanese society: hate speech. Public demonstrations [End Page 435] and online comments against ethnic Korean residents of Japan (zainichi Koreans) attracted media attention within Japan and worldwide a decade ago and spurred international criticism. Particularly shocking was the targeting of a Korean primary school in Kyoto by the Zaitokukai (Zainichi Tokken o Yurusanai Shimin no Kai, or Citizens Association against Special Privileges for Resident Koreans). This book analyzes such hate speech and its relationship to older forms of discrimination against Japan's Korean and outcaste (burakumin) communities. It also details and assesses the diverse recent efforts to address the problem of hate speech, including via new national legislation, subnational government ordinances and guidelines, administrative measures, and court rulings. Through both formal legal analysis and nuanced examinations of policy implementation, this book's 20 chapters significantly advance scholarship about regulatory styles, law and social change, and the balance between freedom of expression and the right to human dignity in Japan. The term "hate speech" (heito supiichi) gained currency in Japan in the early 2010s, and new legislation to address the problem was enacted within just a few years. The 2016 Hate Speech Elimination Act (HSEA) defines hate speech as "unfair discriminatory speech and behavior against persons originating from outside Japan" or "their descendants who are lawfully residing in Japan." This narrow definition reflects what Erin Chung has called "rights hierarchies" in the South Korean context; noncitizens have different human rights protections depending on their visa category.1 And it excludes Japanese minorities like burakumin, Ainu, and Okinawans (for political debates about the definition, see pp. 233–36). Many of this book's contributors document discrimination against burakumin and zainichi Koreans long before the term "hate speech" began circulating and grapple with why zainichi Koreans were targeted most recently (chapter 16). This volume is empirically rich, drawing on formal legal analyses, comparisons of legal scholars' arguments, media and online content analyses, and interviews. For example, chapter 12 uses interview quotes to expose the traumatic impacts of hate speech on members of Kyoto's Korean community. And the social psychological discussion of discrimination, prejudice, and stereotypes illuminates phenomena adjacent to hate speech and the hateful Internet content analyzed in chapter 17. Despite such evidence, the Japanese government reported to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination as recently as 2013 that it "does not believe that, in present-day Japan, racist thoughts are disseminated and racial discrimination is incited to the extent that … legislation to impose punishment … [End Page 436] should be considered even at the risk of unduly stifling legitimate speech" (p. 66, note 30). Indeed, Japan long resisted regulating discriminatory speech, which led some of this book's contributors to worry that Japanese people were unaware of hate speech until the Zaitokukai demonstrations (pp. 222, 239–40). This volume persuasively documents, in a great service to scholars without Japanese-language abilities, one reason for the lack of hate speech regulations: Japanese legal scholars tended to privilege freedom of expression, usually citing the U.S. model rather than the German approach, which emphasizes human dignity (chapters 1 and 15, pp. 242–43, 415–21). Part 2 of the volume (chapters 7–9) details how few legal tools existed for addressing hate speech and racial discrimination in Japan. Criminal and civil claims can be made regarding defamation or insult, but such speech must be targeted against specific individuals or organizations. Since hate speech generally targets broader categories of people, it falls outside existing criminal and tort frameworks in Japan. The book's contributors conclude that it is unlikely that Japanese courts will recognize racist speech and discrimination as a new type of tort anytime soon (p. 204). Ryangok Ku summarizes the weaknesses of Japan's legal and institutional frameworks...

  • Front Matter
  • 10.1089/cyber.2023.29283.editorial
Putting the Toothpaste Back in the Tube: Against Online Hate Speech.
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Empirical Methodology and Legal Scholarship
  • Jan 1, 2002
  • The University of Chicago Law Review
  • Jack Goldsmith + 1 more

In The Rules of Inference' (Rules), Lee Epstein and Gary King argue that all empirical and causal assertions in all legal scholarshipincluding doctrinal, normative, and interpretive scholarship that asserts subsidiary empirical and causal claimsshould follow a unitary approach to inference, one that is grounded in the logic of statistics. From that premise, they advance a sweeping indictment of legal scholarship and its supporting institutions, claiming that every article in their large data pool violates at least one rule of inference2 and urging a radical reorientation of legal education.3 At some level of generality, it is hard to disagree with the spirit of Epstein and King's complaints. Scholarship generally, not only in law or political science, should ground its empirical assertions in warranted inferences from sound evidence, should admit to causal and empirical uncertainty where it exists, should avoid tendentiousness and selection bias, and should follow the best statistical practices when making statistical claims. Lawyers and judges, and indeed educated people generally, would benefit from a basic knowledge of statistical methods. Putting aside the opportunity costs of statistical training (an issue to which we return below), greater attention to the rules of inference would, when appropriate, improve legal scholarship. We nonetheless reject much of Epstein and King's indictment of legal scholarship. We begin in Part I by identifying a broad domain of legal scholarship for which the rules of inference lack obvious relevance. As is unsurprising for outsiders, Epstein and King overlook that legal scholarship frequently pursues doctrinal, interpretive, and normative purposes rather than empirical ones. Legal scholars often are just playing a different game than the empiricists play, which means that no amount of insistence on the empiricists' rules can indict legal scholarship any more than strict adherence to the rules of baseball

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Punishing or regulating? US media attention to hate crime and speech
  • Mar 28, 2025
  • The International Journal of Human Rights
  • Seungyeon Yang + 1 more

This paper aims to examine the evolution of the public discourse on hatred by analysing shifts in media coverage and attention to hate crimes and hate speech over time. The scholarly literature offers varying perspectives, and our study proposes two key frameworks for addressing hate crimes and speech directed at socially vulnerable populations. The first is the prosecutorial approach, which focuses on jurisdiction and the imperative of bringing perpetrators to justice. The second is the regulatory approach, which highlights voluntary regulations by platform companies and the role of online users. Through a topic modelling analysis of 8602 hate-related articles published in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times between 2000 and 2021, our findings indicate a significant shift from the prosecutorial to the regulatory approach over time. This shift underscores the growing influence of online hate speech and the need for comprehensive strategies to address hate-related incidents. Additionally, we observe an expansion in the range of victims, with women increasingly being targeted by hate crimes and hateful expressions.

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  • Cite Count Icon 1
  • 10.24147/2542-1514.2020.4(1).106-122
HATE CRIMES, THE HATE SPEECH PHENOMENON, PRACTICE OF THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE RUSSIAN APPROACH TO DETERMINING EXTREMIST ACTIVITY
  • May 25, 2020
  • Law Enforcement Review
  • Vyacheslav V Koryakovtsev + 2 more

The subject of the research is criminal law rules that provide for criminal liability for hate crimes and the judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights on hate crimes. The purpose of the article is to confirm or refute the hypothesis that a unified approach to the definition of the legal concept of hate speech and the limits of its application is nec-essary. This approach must be based on the legal positions of the European Court of Hu-man Rights The research methodology includes analysis and interpretation of court decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as a dialectical approach to the analysis of vari-ous points of view to the definition of extremist activity. The main results and scope of their application. The relevance of the research proposed for publication is due to the lack of uniform practice of applying the articles of the Russian Criminal Code on so-called "hate crimes" by Russian courts and the presence of signifi-cant contradictions in the positions of the European Court of Human Rights and the state position of the Russian Federation in defining key concepts in this area that are extremely important for criminal procedure and administrative activities. The paper considers scien-tific and practical attempts to define "hate crimes" in the global and regional human rights systems, basic recommendations of the UN on countering such crimes, and offers an interpretation of the term hate speech in relation to the related criminological concept of hate crime. The text provides statistical data describing the level of such crime and the practice of the ECHR in this area, mentions a list of criteria according to which "hate crimes" can be motivated by language differences, gender, sexual orientation and other characteristics, as well as criteria that distinguish hate speech from freedom of expres-sion, and suggests decriminalization of part 1 of article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code. Conclusions. It is necessary to unify the concepts of "hate crimes" (and the practice of their application) in the direction of, in particular, reducing the number of decisions of the European Court of Human Rights against the Russian Federation and increasing the level of legal protection of both the individual citizen of the Russian Federation and freedom of speech and expression.

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Rights of Victims of Hate Speech and Hate Crimes – European Standards
  • Jan 1, 2024
  • Zoran Pavlović

The rights of victims of hate speech and hate crimes are part of the rights in the system of support for victims and witnesses of criminal acts according to domestic legislation and international and European standards. Directive 2012/29/EU foresees an obligation for member states (and candidates) to take measures to establish a protection system. Effective protection implies not only a normative framework but also real protection. The specifics of hate speech and hate crimes also conditioned the adoption of Directive CM/Rec (2022) 16, which foresees measures to combat hate speech. Some expressions of hate speech require a criminal law response, including obligations of a preventive nature on the part of public authorities. That is why encouraging individuals and groups to report hate speech and hate crimes and providing protection is part of an evolving legal culture. Victims should also be supported by the media, which in modern society often has a decisive role, through compliance with legal regulations and reporting in accordance with the rules of the profession. Social networks are an indispensable element in the policy of preventing and fighting against hate speech and hate crimes, and their role is becoming increasingly important.

  • Book Chapter
  • Cite Count Icon 6
  • 10.4324/9780203578988-16
A governance of denial 1
  • Jan 1, 2014
  • Nicole L Asquith

Notwithstanding over two decades of 'hate speech' legislation, hate crime regulation in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) is in its infancy, with limited criminal sanctions intro­duced in the last ten years. Across the ten jurisdictions, there are a variety of legislative, policy and practice responses to 'hate speech' (vilification) and prejudice-related violence (hate crime). This chapter will outline the institutional and cultural contexts in which these responses emerge as a criminal justice issue before proceeding to a critical discussion of antipodean hate crime governance. In Australia and New Zealand, as occurs elsewhere, the strategies employed by governments to remedy prejudice, intolerance and hatred occur on a continuum; ranging from global mission statements about multiculturalism/biculturalism, through to the enactment of civil anti-discrimination and anti-vilification legislation. These civil remedies have also been extended in some cases to criminal codes and sentencing legislation, and the enshrinement of individual rights to freedom from violence in human rights charters. A complete survey of all these strategies is not possible within the limits of this chapter. Instead, case studies from throughout the region are presented here as exemplars of the strategies employed, and issues and critical barriers faced, in reducing prejudice-related violence.

  • Research Article
  • Cite Count Icon 17
  • 10.1177/1362480615581102
Systematic racist violence in Russia between ‘hate crime’ and ‘ethnic conflict’
  • Apr 30, 2015
  • Theoretical Criminology
  • Richard Arnold

Racist violence in Russia has recently become a subject of interest to scholars and analysts of Russian politics. What are the similarities and differences between racist violence in Russia and the West? How does the level of Russian racist violence compare to other societies? Do racist hate groups in Russia have similar origins to groups in the West? This article considers these questions. I first demonstrate that Russia is indeed the most dangerous country in Europe for ethnic minorities, and argue that such violence is more ‘systematic’ (structured, ideologically coherent, patterned) than in other developed societies. The high level of violence against ethnic minorities in Russia is ‘over-determined’ by a combination of post-Soviet social and economic social changes, the brutalizing consequences of a long counter-insurgency campaign, and government passivity (and sometimes complicity) in the face of racist violence and hate speech. Thus, Russia’s systematic racist violence is analytically closer to outright ethnic conflict than to a form of criminal deviance that could aptly be termed ‘hate crime’.

  • Research Article
  • Cite Count Icon 1
  • 10.33327/ajee-18-7.2-a000218
DUAL SANCTIONING OF HATE CRIMES AND HATE SPEECH AS PART OF EXTREMISM IN THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC: CONCEPTUAL, LEGISLATIVE AND PRACTICAL ISSUES
  • Apr 30, 2024
  • Access to Justice in Eastern Europe
  • Sergej Romža + 2 more

Background: Extremism poses a cross-border social problem, lacking a universally accepted definition. In principle, so-called hate crimes are specific types of criminal offences that cut across all types of extremism. We can even talk about their conceptual overlap. A special category of hate crimes is represented by so-called verbal attacks, known as hate speech, which are considered an abuse of freedom of expression from an international perspective as well as in jurisprudence of the European Court on Human Rights. As a result of such a perception, their criminal sanction comes into consideration. In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity of criminal law repression, another method of sanctioning hate crimes and hate speech is also possible, namely by administrative law. The existence of “multiple legal regulations” on extremism as delict caused a dual sanctioning system of extremism. It leads to application problems in legal practice, for example, an unclear understanding of offences from criminal and administrative perspectives or even the weak possibility of investigating such acts by State power. The main objective of the contribution is to point out the dual legal regulation (criminal and administrative) of the sanctioning of extremism, in particular its special category – hate crimes and hate speech. Moreover, the objective of the contribution is to assess its unclear issues in legal understanding and to identify specific application problems caused by its dual system (criminal and administrative). Special attention is focused on applicable sanctions in both the criminal law area and administrative law areas. At the end, suggestions on how to solve indicated problems are introduced. Methods: The primary sources used for the elaboration of the contribution are scholarly sources (books, studies, scientific papers, etc.), legislative instruments (national and international legislation) and case law (of Slovak national courts and the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union). The authors use traditional methods of legal scientific (jurisprudential) research – general scientific methods and special methods of legal science (jurisprudence). The general scientific methods used in the paper are predominantly logical methods, namely, the method of analysis, the method of synthesis, the method of analogy, and the descriptive method. The descriptive method has been used to familiarise the reader with the current legal regulation of extremism. The method of analysis has been used regarding relevant legal provisions and case-laws of courts. The method of synthesis has also been used. The special methods of legal science used here predominantly include methods belonging to a group of interpretative methods, namely, the teleological method, the systematic method and the comparative method. The teleological method has been used to explain the purpose of legislative instruments. The systematic method has been used to classify the relevant applicable law. The comparative method has been used to examine the relationship between legislative perspectives – criminal and administrative. Results and Conclusions: Regarding extremism offences committed in the Slovak Republic, in specific cases, the decision making whether the committed offence is criminal or of an administrative nature depends on the attitude of the person who committed it. In the Slovak Republic, legislative amendments are intended to address the area of extremism offences, but they have not been introduced as final. A new legal regulation of the administrative offences of extremism is envisaged in terms of their definition. A new sanctioning policy of extremism administrative offences by juvenile offenders is also expected. Moreover, the application of probation in case of offences committed by juvenile delinquents in the area of extremism is recommended and preferred. It would highlight the importance of restorative justice, including its strengthening. Probation would allow the court, when sanctioning extremism in the criminal law area, to create a so-called tailor-made sanction, which would strengthen the individualisation of the sanction, the educational purpose of the sanction and the achievement of both the purpose of the sanction and the purpose of the Criminal Code, which is to protect society from criminal offences and their perpetrators. Even the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic partially examined the modification of the elements of criminal offences of extremism.

  • Research Article
  • Cite Count Icon 1
  • 10.1086/722808
Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Catharine A. MacKinnon about Power, Politics, and Political Science
  • Nov 30, 2022
  • Polity
  • Robyn Marasco + 1 more

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Catharine A. MacKinnon about Power, Politics, and Political Science

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  • Research Article
  • Cite Count Icon 1
  • 10.17159/obiter.v27i1.14430
HATE-MOTIVATED VIOLENCE: IS IT LINKED TO HATEFUL EXPRESSION?
  • Jul 24, 2022
  • Obiter
  • Am Anderson

In 1996, the late Prof JMT Labuschagne wrote an article dealing with the limits of freedom of speech and hate speech (“Menseregtelike en Strafregtelike Bekamping van Groepsidentiteitmatige Krenking en Geweld” 1996 De Jure 23). He discussed freedom of expression and hate speech in the United States of America, various European countries, South Africa and also within the context of international law. He subsequently discussed the idea of updating his thoughts, taking into consideration the influence of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 and the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (4 of 2000, commonly referred to as the “Discrimination Act”). Sadly, he never got around to doing so. Since his 1996 article, much development has taken place in this field including the introduction of the 2004 Draft Prohibition of Hate Speech Bill. The events of 11 September 2001 in the USA and the 2005 bombings in London (and other similar attacks all over the world) have increased intolerance and suspicion between people from different races and religions manyfold. Immediately following the London bombings, it was reported that religious hate crime (that is, attacks targeting England’s Muslim community) had increased by nearly 600% (“Religious Hate Crime Up 600%” 2005-08-0221:14 SA http://www.news24.com visited 2 Aug 2005). Hate speech is regarded as an exception to freedom of speech/expression. The notion of freedom of expression has been discussed at length by various South African writers (Johannessen “A Critical View of the Constitutional Hate Speech Provision: Section 16” 1997 SAJHR 136; Devenish “Freedom of Expression: The ‘Marketplace’ of Ideas”1995 TSAR 442; Carpenter “Fundamental Rights: Is There a Pecking Order?” 1995 Codicillus 27; Johannessen “Freedom of Expression and Information in the New South African Constitution and Its Compatibility with International Standards” 1995 SAJHR 216; Van Rooyen “Censorship in a Future South Africa: A Legal Perspective” 1994 De Jure 283; Nesser “Hate Speech in the New South Africa: Constitutional Considerations for a Land Recovering from Decades of Racial Repression and Violence” 1994 SAJHR 336; and Marcus “Freedom of Expression Under the Constitution” 1994 SAJHR 140). This note briefly touches on some aspects relating to freedomof expression and hate speech and also explores the (rather newly discovered) notion of hate crime. It asks the question whether there is any connection between hate speech and hate crime.

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