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In view of the meeting of the Council Working party on Fundamental Rights and Free Movement of Persons (FREMP) on 21 November, Social Platform and Amnesty International submitted the following recommendations for consideration when discussing the draft Council conclusions on combating hate crime.

• The Council conclusions should clearly acknowledge that, in order to effectively combat hate crime, the EU must adopt a comprehensive approach that looks beyond judicial cooperation and ‘joins the dots’ between criminal justice, non discrimination and human rights. Policy and legal responses to hate crimes should be part of a broader and ambitious EU policy aimed at combating all forms of discrimination.
• The conclusions should further acknowledge the need for the EU to adopt new binding instruments to address some of the obvious protection gaps under the current legal framework.
• The conclusions should also stress that new legislative initiatives need to go hand in hand with the effective implementation of existing relevant instruments. In particular, detailed guidelines on the protection and rights of victims of hate crime should be elaborated in the context of the transposition of the Victims Directive by member states. Furthermore, hate crime should be taken into due consideration in monitoring member states’ implementation of their obligations under the Equality Directives.

Our recommendations are very much in line with the conclusions of the Fundamental Rights Conference on hate crime that took place in Vilnius on 12-13 November. We are hopeful that they will be reflected in the Council conclusions in December and translated into concrete action in the next year.

Read the full joint letter here by Social Platform and Amnesty International

Read our previous news including our Director Pierre Baussand's speech at the Fundamental Rights Conference

2013-11-18