Shocking in its many forms, from crude cartoons to murder, anti-Semitism is far from being a problem of the past. Governments and civil society must co-operate to effectively oppose this contemporary challenge.
Prosecutors need awareness, knowledge and skills to convince courts that certain crimes are motivated by prejudice and bias. Since they play a central role in identifying and countering hate crimes, they must have access to the right tools to accomplish this task.
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.