Croatia

How hate crime data is collected

Police officers must identify a motive for every crime committed. A person's race, colour, religion, national or ethnic origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity are identified as protected characteristics in the criminal code. The recording of hate crimes by police and other authorities is governed by the 2011 Protocol on procedure in cases of hate crime.

This protocol requires that police officers establish, inter alia: (a) the affiliation of the injured party with a group, membership of which is a motive for a hate crime; (b) the motive for the hate crime and the perpetrators’ membership of a group; (c) the consequences; (d) how it was established that the incident was motivated by hatred. Police officers will identify and log hate crimes through electronic forms in the Ministry of Interior's information system, which is used to monitor all criminal cases.

Under a 2006 internal instruction, reflected by the protocol on hate crime, prosecutors are required to identify hate crime cases and record the file number, name of suspects and type of criminal offence. The Public Prosecution Service is obliged to keep records of all cases of hate crime.

The criminal departments in municipal courts and first instance misdemeanour courts are responsible for keeping separate records of hate crimes, collecting data on the numbers of cases, their outcomes, the number of defendants, and the duration of the trial and sanctions. Both judicial bodies record their cases in a case management system. When a case marked as a hate crime enters the system, it is flagged as such in the system, so that the case can be extracted and summarized at the end of the reporting period.

Police data on hate crimes are compiled every six months by the Ministry of Interior and forwarded to the Public Prosecution Service. After adding the information received from the Public Prosecution Service for the reporting period, the dataset is finalized by the Ministry of Justice, which includes judicial information, such as the outcome of the trial. The Ministry of Justice submits the six-month report to the Office for Human Rights and Rights of National Minorities, which consolidates and publishes the data on its website.