Hate Crime or Hooliganism? How ODIHR is Helping to Tackle an Ill-defined Problem
But it has had to sidestep a few obstacles along the way. The two most significant stumbling blocks are the lack of an accepted definition of hate crimes within the OSCE and the dearth of statistics on such crimes in individual countries.
Which raises the question: how exactly do you fight a problem that can be neither clearly defined nor sufficiently quantified?
One thing that distinguishes hate crimes from similar crimes not based on prejudice is the status of the victim.
"The effect [of hate crime] is more severe because the victim is not random," says Acting Inspector Tim Parsons of the Race and Diversity Unit of the City of London Police. "The victim is especially selected because of a particular trait, which often instils a sense of fear in an entire community."
The question of definition
Agreeing on what those particular traits are, however, is largely what has prevented the OSCE from coming up with an accepted definition of hate crime.
"One country's hate crime is another's hooliganism," says Ambassador Christian Strohal, ODIHR Director. "We have 55 states in the OSCE and many different opinions as to what constitutes a hate crime."
To get around this problem, the ODIHR developed its own working definition that takes a broad approach, offering protection to as many potential victims as possible.
"Where states have legislation in place, we, of course, recognize that, and we work with them within that framework," says Jo-Anne Bishop, Head of Tolerance and Non-Discrimination at the ODIHR. "But our definition provides an important tool for our own training programmes, which are aimed at ensuring the protection of individuals. From our point of view, no one should be excluded and denied protection."
But even where countries have passed laws calling for stiffer penalties when hate is a motivating factor in a crime, those laws are not always used. Police investigators often fail to recognize tell-tale signs that a crime was motivated by hate, and prosecutors often push for lesser charges instead of seeking a conviction for a hate crime.
Compounding the problem is the lack of statistics available for individual countries and the OSCE region as a whole. This is particularly troubling in terms of formulating long-term prevention strategies.
"If governments want to not only prosecute perpetrators of hate crimes today but to prevent further crimes in the future, they need to know who the perpetrators are and who they're targeting and why," says the ODIHR's Bishop.
Training law enforcement officers
Many of the ODIHR's activities aimed at combating hate crimes involve the collection and dissemination of information. One, however, is geared towards having an immediate impact: its training programme for law enforcement officers.
The ODIHR and its team of law enforcement experts from six OSCE states - Canada, France, Hungary, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States - have developed a curriculum that draws on the expertise of law enforcement professionals from throughout the region.
Using a train-the-trainer approach that is tailored to each target country, the programme teaches police officers methods for identifying and investigating hate crimes, as well as skills for sharing intelligence and working with prosecutors.
"Law enforcement agencies, particularly front-line officers, have an important role to play in leading the fight against hate crimes," says Paul Goldenberg, programme manager of the ODIHR's training programme for law enforcement officers. "Police are often at the forefront of social change. They are in a unique and vital position in maintaining civil society and protecting the safety and security of a nation's citizenry."
Since being piloted in Spain and Hungary in 2005, the hate-crime curriculum has been added to the regular training programme for officers studying at the police academies in both countries.
The ODIHR is now expanding its programme in 2006 to include training for prosecutors, which is currently being piloted in Croatia and Ukraine.
"While hate-crimes training needs to be tailored to the needs of individual countries, one lesson is universal: when hate crimes are not vigorously investigated and prosecuted, there are extreme costs," says Goldenberg. "It is not only the victims who suffer, nor is the damage limited to the group to which they are perceived to belong. It is [also] to the social fabric itself, because the message is clearly heard by the haters ... that there is an 'unremarkable' and 'tolerable' level of hate violence."
The need for information
Finding information on hate crimes is no easy task. For one thing, there has been little comprehensive research on the issue, apart from one report on racist crime by the EU's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia and another by the US-based NGO Human Rights First.
Nor is there much information available from the states themselves, as only a few of the 55 OSCE countries keep comprehensive and reliable data on hate crimes.
"The lack of information available on the incidence of hate crimes means that this phenomenon is, to a large extent, hidden from the public," says the ODIHR's Bishop. "However, we are encouraged by the fact that this trend is changing, as a number of states have already appointed officials who will be responsible for collecting national data on hate crimes and sharing it with the ODIHR, which will help us to formulate longer-term strategies to tackle the problem."
The first meeting of national focal points on hate crime will be organized by the ODIHR in the autumn. This will provide officials from throughout the region with an opportunity to discuss common strategies and to develop methods for improving the collection of statistics on hate crime.