Blog Articles

On 5 December a Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe (CEJI) – of which Social Platform is a partner – launched ‘Facing all the Facts’ – an online course on hate crime and hate speech monitoring. Robin Sclafani, Director of CEJI presented its key components: cooperation, as ‘Facing all the Facts’ is produced in partnership with more than 20 organisations, and in collaboration with law enforcement authorities and practitioners in six Member States (Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom). Secondly, inter-cultural solidarity; CEJI works with a wide variety of organisations representing, for example, different religions and beliefs and different groups such as Roma, LGBT and people with disabilities. Thirdly, training for all stakeholders on how to identify, record and monitor hate crime. Their online course has been developed together with Google and Twitter. CEJI aims to train 8,000 people across the EU in two years, offering multiple modules of interactive learning and drawing on practitioners’ experiences. Read more here or watch this short video.

Two days later I participated in the European Union High Level Group meeting on combating racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance, gathering representatives from all EU Member States and civil society representatives (read my blog from the first meeting here).

Firstly the meeting focused on training. More than half of EU Member States provide some form of hate crime training for law enforcement and/or criminal justice officers, with several offering targeted training on topics such as anti-muslim or homophobic hate crime. It is proven most successful when integrated in broader training initiatives, and when designed, customised and assessed with the involvement of civil society and the local community. Only a limited number of Member States train executive and senior officials, which is necessary to build leadership. To mention a few good practices: in Finland, hate crime training is a mandatory part of police training; Austria applies a human-rights based approach to their training sessions; and in Antwerp in Belgium, police officers are trained to share their knowledge with other colleagues. Several speakers echoed the important role of civil society that offers hate crime training to national authorities, fosters trust and engagement of communities with the authorities and improves reporting. Some of the challenges identified came from Member States raising the concern of “organisations supporting one group while building hatred against another”, they “cannot be part of the solution when at the same time being a part of the problem”. Malcolm M Jallow from the pan-African organisation in Sweden stressed that “we need to involve the community affected, those that have real life experience of violence as experts in training police”. “Training about what is a hate crime is the easy part, the challenge is to respond to when hate crimes are perpetrated by government officials and police, how do we investigate our colleagues?”, asked the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee.

Secondly the meeting looked at the European Commission code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online with Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube (‘the IT companies’). The code of conduct mentions the role of civil society in preventing the rise of hatred online by developing counter narratives, promoting non-discrimination and awareness-raising. Civil society is seen as a partner to act as ‘trusted reporter’, and IT companies should work with civil society organisations to “deliver best practice training on countering hateful rhetoric and help them to deliver effective counter hate speech campaigns”.

Věra Jourová, European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality presented the results of the first phase of the monitoring of the implementation of the code of conduct. Twelve organisations in nine Member States notified IT companies about 600 cases in total, resulting in YouTube removing 48% of the offensive content, Facebook 28% and Twitter 19%. The figures put in question why most cases were not considered hate speech; organisations at the meeting presented several examples of hate speech that were not removed. The European Commission reminded us that EU Member States are bound by the ‘framework decision on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law’. Facebook pointed out that the focus has to be at what is considered speech that can have dangerous consequences in a specific context. Furthermore, Facebook reassured us that they are continually developing their standards to counter hate speech with the help of civil society, and informing their users what they do and when content is being removed. Twitter has put in place a new feature for users to mute key words and content from the feed, and Google has trained nine Member States to flag up hate speech online, and are funding YouTube Creators for Change to amplify voices of role models to counter hate speech and extremism.

To be continued

Next year the High Level Group’s focus will be on establishing an appropriate monitoring definition of hate crime and better ways of reporting. As long as hate crimes are not recorded they are not reported, leading to impunity and a lack of the evidence-based policy that we need, explained the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights. As civil society organisations we insist on being involved, as many equality networks have experience of developing methods, definitions and indicators. The European Network Against Racism also recommended that the High Level Group addresses ethnic profiling. Generalisations based on race, ethnicity, religion or national origin leads to both discrimination and mistrust of law enforcement. Countering populism will be one of Social Platform’s priorities during 2017. We will draw on our members’ expertise and build capacity to monitor the rhetoric and debate in the media and on social media, and to develop counter-arguments.