Greece

How hate crime data is collected

The Hellenic Police has established two departments for countering racist violence in the Sub-divisions of State Security of Athens and Thessaloniki and 68 Offices against Racist Violence in the country whose main competence is to investigate racist (hate) crimes. Both in these offices and in all the police departments of the country, the police officers use the same, unified, electronic system (Police online internal network) for recording crimes. Especially for the recording of hate crimes, a Circular Order issued by the Chief of the Hellenic Police in 2014 supplements the general recording instructions. All necessary data for each case (crime, offence, etc.) are inserted, including the place, time, legal characterization of the offense, the characteristics of the perpetrator, the victim's identity, the description of the incident and the administrative and procedural actions that have taken place. The system provides an option for racist crimes that has to be answered (Racially motivated crime? Yes/No). If the answer is "Yes", a second file is opened for choosing the racist motivation (race, colour, religion, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability). At the same time, all crimes that have been characterized as racist crimes are recorded in a separate electronic database. The State Security Directorate analyses the data, extracted from the above mentioned database, and informs the Ministry of Justice, Transparency and Human Rights.

The Public Prosecutor Office (PPO) of the Court of First Instance of Athens, which is the biggest PPO in Greece, has, since 2016, recorded hate crimes cases separately by registering them with a separate indicator. This flagging facilitates tracking the case till its referral to the competent court or, when the case is archived because the perpetrator is unknown, or when the Public Prosecutor decides not to prosecute. However this reference number does not give any information about the bias motivations which characterize the illegal behaviour. The above flagging method is planned to be used in other big PPOs, especially in the other four where public prosecutors are specially appointed to investigate and prosecute hate crimes.

The Courts do not have a separate system to flag and trace hate crimes cases. Court decisions received a unique number with no other characteristics concerning the nature of the crimes they have dealt with.

Furthermore in 2017, the Hellenic Police, with the co-operation of Ministry of Justice, Transparency and Human Rights and the PPO of the Court of First Instance of Athens, created a new template for recording hate crimes. The aim of this template is to harmonize the way the data are collected from the police and the PPO and to facilitate the tracking of each case from its first recording until the prosecution (or the filing of the case by the Public Prosecutor) and, in a second stage, until the court decision. The Hellenic Police inserts the hate crime case in the template, mentioning all the necessary elements for tracking the case after its referral to the competent PPO. The file is sent to the Ministry of Justice, Transparency and Human Rights in order to be completed, with the co-operation of the PPOs of the country, with the Public Prosecutor's decision to prosecute or not and the decisions of the Court of the First Instance and of the Court of Appeal.