Brussels, 29/11/2012 (Agence Europe) - On 27 November, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) published two new reports. An FRA press release explained that the reports illustrate how, “hate crime is a daily reality throughout the EU” and that that this includes violence and offenses motivated by racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, or by a person's disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. The first report entitled “Making hate crime visible in the European Union: acknowledging victims' rights” offers a comparative analysis of official data collection mechanisms on hate crime in the EU member states. The second report, “EU-MIDIS Data in Focus 6: Minorities as Victims of Crime” presents data on respondents' experiences of victimization across five types of crime, from theft to serious harassment.
According to this second report, the FRA indicates that every fourth person (24%) of the 23,500 respondents to the EU-MIDIS survey - the first EU-wide survey to specifically sample ethnic minority and immigrant groups on their perception of racially or ethnically motivated crime - said they had been a victim of crime at least once in the 12 months preceding the survey. On average, 18% of all Roma and 18% of all sub-Saharan African respondents in the survey indicated that they had experienced at least one racially motivated crime in the last 12 months, which means that these groups are the groups most exposed to hate crime. According to FRA statistics, it is in the Czech Republic that the Roma say they suffer most from serious harassment or assault, whereas it is in Finland and Denmark where Somalis say they confront this kind of crime most often.
The EU agency recommends that, “to combat hate crime, the EU and its member states need to make these crimes more visible and hold perpetrators to account”. The agency adds that, “Greater political will is needed on the part of decision makers to counter pervasive prejudice against certain groups and compensate for the damage. Victims and witnesses should therefore be encouraged to report such crimes, and legislation should be adopted at the EU and national levels obliging member states to collect and publish hate-crime data”. The FRA argues that to hold perpetrators better to account, legislators should also consider enhanced penalties for hate crimes to stress the severity of these offences, while courts rendering judgments should address bias motivations publicly, making it clear that they lead to harsher sentences.
According to the FRA, half of all member states have incomplete registers of hate crime and 13 states were only able to provide “limited statistics” on hate crime linked to race, religion and gender, particularly in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Hungary. The agency also pointed out that no data at all was being collected in Romania on this subject. (SP/transl.fl)