ODIHR publishes hate crime data on International Day for Tolerance, emphasizing need for close co-operation between states and civil society

WARSAW, 16 November 2017 – To mark the International Day for Tolerance, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) today published hate crime data for 2016 on its dedicated website. This year's data, which have been submitted by OSCE participating States, civil society groups and international organizations can, for the first time, be comprehensively searched, filtered and downloaded.

The 2016 data include information on 44 participating States, including disaggregated official hate crime statistics for 17 countries and a detailed overview of how 34 participating States process and record hate crimes. This is complemented by hate incidents in 48 participating States as reported by 125 civil society groups, the UNHRC and the OSCE field operations.

"On the International Day for Tolerance, this is our contribution to support the important fight against intolerance and discrimination in the OSCE region," said ODIHR Director Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir. "We want to see participating States addressing all acts and manifestations of hate, including hate crimes, vigorously and in earnest.  We stand ready to assist them and the more they report hate crime information to ODIHR, the better we are able to do so, whether by strengthening how they record, process and disaggregate hate crime data, or through other capacity-building programmes for police and prosecutors."

"Incidents reported by civil society are also an essential element of our reporting. To properly reflect the richness of the data we receive, we have created a platform this year that allows users to filter and download data directly from our website," said Gísladóttir. "This means that researchers, local authorities and any other interested parties can access and use the data more easily and effectively."

ODIHR has worked closely with National Points of Contact on hate crime, who are responsible for reporting hate crime data to the Office, and is meeting with these today and tomorrow in Vienna. The purpose of this meeting is to further strengthen collaboration between participating States and ODIHR on hate crime data collection.

ODIHR publishes hate crime data annually at hatecrime.osce.org.