Croatia

Croatia regularly reports hate crime data to ODIHR. Croatia's hate crime laws are a combination of a general penalty-enhancement provision and penalty-enhancement provisions for specific offences. Croatia's criminal code also includes a statutory definition of hate crime. Hate crime data are collected by the Ministry of Interior, the Prosecutor's Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Office for Human Rights and Rights of National Minorities. Data on hate crime are regularly published by the Government's Office for Human Rights and Rights of National Minorities.

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, 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 adds 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.

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SELECT YEAR

Official Data

Year	Hate crimes recorded by police	Prosecuted	Sentenced
2019	48	117	10
2018	33	23	8
2017	25	16	12
2016	35	37	7
2015	24	27	7

Hate crimes recorded by police

The police numbers represent the number of recorded offences. One incident can involve more than one offence.

By bias motivation By type of crime

Download official data

National developments

The Office for Human Rights and the Rights of National Minorities, together with the Judicial Academy, carried out set of hate crimes workshops for members of the judiciary, police, prosecuting authorities and civil society organizations. During the workshops, participants studied the relevant case of the European Court of Human Rights, notably Šečić v. Croatia and Škorjanec v. Croatia, as well as Balázs v. Hungary, Grigoryan and Sergeyeva v. Ukraine, Milanović v. Serbia, Nachova and Others v. Bulgaria, among others. In 2019, a second round of workshops were carried out for 109 participants. In order to improve the hate crime data collection system, the Working Group on the Drafting of the Protocol on Hate Crime began drafting a New Protocol, which should be adopted by the end of 2020. The New Protocol on Hate Crime aims to ensure the collection of relevant statistical data, while also: defining the obligations of individual institutions dealing with hate crime; determining the responsibilities of the competent authorities involved in detecting, treating and monitoring the results of procedures conducted in hate crime cases; and defining specific forms for statistical collecting data on hate crime cases.