Abstract
Abstract Hate crimes poison societies by threatening individual rights, human dignity and equality. They effect private lives, or even victims’ life and limb. Due to their ripple effect, they terrify whole communities, reinforce tensions between social groups, ultimately jeopardising peaceful coexistence. No society is immune from the signs of hatred, but whether they get tamed or whether prejudices are deepened, depends on the social measures that are applied vis-à-vis the phenomenon. The state’s reaction creates norms and will informs society about the current acceptable standards. European expectations help forming these. Standards developed by the European Court of Human Rights include the obligations to ensure that hate against social groups as a motivation is considered an aggravating circumstance or leads to penalty enhancement. States must also ensure that national investigation authorities show special vigilance to explore and unmask the bias motives behind hate crimes. Such European expectations still leave a wide room of manoeuvre to respond to hate crimes efficiently and dissuasively. But irrespectively of the national codification method, for legal provisions to reach the desired outcome, certain social preconditions must be met. For hate crime laws or provisions to work, states must reach a certain level of maturity from the viewpoint of democracy, fundamental rights in general and the rule of law, where guaranteeing judicial independence is an absolute minimum.
Highlights
The majority of papers in this semi-thematic special volume discuss hate crimes
These behaviours are not regarded as hate crimes, even when they are criminalised.3. Irrespective of their labelling, these manifestations of social hatred can be left unanswered. Both discrimination and certain forms of hate speech might be the stepping stones to violent hate crimes, these behaviours must be addressed by the state, so as not to allow minor manifestations of hostility have a ripple effect and escalate into violent bias crimes.4Judit Bayer has extensively dealt with a significant aspect of hate speech, namely hate speech by persons of authority, assessing it against the protection of political speech and the high impact it may have on social hatred
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) developed the doctrine of states’ positive obligation to conduct effective investigations. These rights read in conjunction with Article of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) led to a rich case-law on responding to hate crimes in the last years
Summary
The majority of papers in this semi-thematic special volume discuss hate crimes. The contributors are members of the SPECTRA Research Group established at the Department of Criminology in the Faculty of Law at E€otv€os Lorand University, following the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Lendu€let (English: Momentum) excellence program being awarded to the Author. The research team explores the social prerequisites for the effective fight against hate crimes through criminal law means and minority rights protection. The first element of a hate crime is an act that constitutes a crime under ordinary criminal law – this is the base offence. Irrespective of their labelling, these manifestations of social hatred can be left unanswered Both discrimination and certain forms of hate speech might be the stepping stones to violent hate crimes, these behaviours must be addressed by the state, so as not to allow minor manifestations of hostility have a ripple effect and escalate into violent bias crimes.4Judit Bayer has extensively dealt with a significant aspect of hate speech, namely hate speech by persons of authority, assessing it against the protection of political speech and the high impact it may have on social hatred. In the following supranational expectations will be enumerated with a European focus
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