A Roma child is sprayed with acid in the streets of Naples. A kosher grocery store is ransacked on the margins of a protest. An African student is attacked in a Łódź club. Taken separately, these events can be seen as random attacks. Linking these disparate crimes together paints a wider portrait.
When hate crime victim Kazeem Busari was asked about the effectiveness of the Polish authorities in investigating and prosecuting racist incidents, he reaches for a dancing metaphor:
it takes two to tango.
Fifteen Muslim women and men recounted their own experiences of hate-motivated violence and discrimination, while highlighting factors that either hamper or facilitate better response to hate crimes as part of a focus group facilitated by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in Vienna on 12 July 2014.
Strategies for combatting and reporting hate crimes were the focus of two training events – one for Italian civil society activists and the other for law enforcement officers – organized by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in Rome from 30 June to 4 July 2014.