By KUNA,
Paris : In his latest Viewpoint, the Council of Europes Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg reviews recent episodes of intolerance in different countries in Europe and proposes concrete measures to combat hate crimes.
In his report, the Commissioner called on political leaders to firmly stand up for human rights and respect for diversity, saying “Hate crimes are a daily reality all over the European continent. Government authorities have a responsibility to put an end to these shameful assaults”.
According to the Viewpoint, credible recent reports show that people suffer violence because they are black, Jewish, Roma or Muslim, besides other unjustifiable reasons.
The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) presents facts and analysis about such crimes in its country reports and recommendations on how to counter them, the report noted.
All these documents demonstrate the danger of allowing prejudices against others to take root and spread but unfortunately, the step from hate speech to hate crime is easily made.
Hammarberg indicated in his Viewpoint that a mixture of “Islamophobia and racism is also directed against immigrant Muslims or their children”.
This tendency has increased considerably after the September 11 attacks and government responses to such terrorist crimes, he stressed.
According to the report, “Muslims have been physically attacked and mosques vandalized or burnt in a number of countries,” indicating that in France five mosques were attacked with explosives or put alight in 2006.
It added that some of these assaults may have been committed by “distorted individual minds but many of them bear the imprints of neo-Nazi groups or other organized, extremist gangs who tend to be at the same time racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Roma, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and homophobic,” and that they may also target “foreigners and persons with disabilities”.
The Commissioner stressed that the seriousness of such crimes and the duty of governments to take action to stop them have also been underlined by the Court of Human Rights.
As for what measures should be taken to in concrete terms to prevent and react upon cases of hate crime, the Commissioner said that anti-discrimination bodies should be established with a broad mandate and the authority to address hate violence through monitoring, reporting and assistance to victims.
He added that governments should establish co-operative relations with minority communities themselves and invite proposals on measures to be taken to prevent and act upon concrete hate incidents as this would build confidence within the community and reassure citizens that reports of hate crimes are taken seriously.
Also, steps should be taken to ensure that the bias-motivated crimes are monitored and that data is collected on them and their circumstances, access to complaints procedures needs to be improved for both individual victims and defence groups, the judicial response to hate crimes must be severe and that the existing hate crime laws must be promptly enforced in order to increase their deterrent effect. The procedures should be well documented and made public.
On top of these concrete steps there is a need to invest more energy into prevention in order to inform and educate to address the ignorance and fear which often is behind xenophobia and intolerance, the Commissioner stressed.
He indicated that school curricula in Council of Europe member states should nowadays also include education about other religions and cultures with the aim of countering intolerance, and that the media also has a responsibility not to become a vehicle for the dissemination of hate speech and the promotion of violence.
According to Hammarberg, “some politicians undermine such efforts by using their platforms to foster and exploit prejudices, rather than to stand up for human rights and respect for those who are different,” saying that “they should be held responsible”.