The breakdown below presents records referring to bias motivations. A number of offences involved more than one bias motivation.
In 2020, the Swedish Police Authority and Victim Support Sweden continued to work to enhance the skills of police officers and victim support volunteers to identify hate crimes, with the aim of increasing public confidence in the criminal justice system and reducing the number of unreported hate crimes.
The Police organized training events for local police officers to improve their capacity in responding to hate crimes, including in the area of the treatment of hate crime victims. Under the Bergslagen Mentoring Project, which is aimed at producing a handbook on hate crimes, further capacity building initiatives for police officers were implemented at regional and national levels.
The Police Advisory Board, involving, among others, members of Roma groups/organizations, the Swedish Federation for LGBTQI Rights, Full Personality Expression Sweden, and representatives of the Muslim and Jewish communities, met four times in 2020. A key objective of the Board is to increase confidence among groups targeted by hate crime.
The Malmö Police worked with the Civil Defenders NGO and the (Police-led) Anti-Democracy and Hate Crimes Group South to address anti-Roma hate crime through a study, the report on which was presented at a conference in December 2020. Throughout the project, hate crime victims were involved and the initiative allowed for the building of a dialogue between them and the police.
In May 2020, the Swedish Prosecution Service organized a hate crime webinar focusing on proving the motive behind the crime, including the investigative measures applied to detect bias motivations.
The Swedish Crime Victim Authority organized a campaign and capacity-building activities on the topic of online threats based on bias for representatives of the judiciary and civil society, and continued to sponsor several civil society organizations and provided support to victims of hate crime through its Crime Victim Fund.
The City of Gothenburg continued to develop its anti-racism plan, in consultation with the Swedish Police Authority (the Anti-Democracy and Hate Crimes Group), in order to create clear guidelines and to improve the city's role as a service provider.
This category includes unspecified bias motivations where it was clear that the offence constituted a hate crime, but the specific bias motivation could not be identified.
Official data were reported separately for "homophobic" (141) and "transphobic" (73) hate crimes, but are presented together here. Furthermore, this category includes 104 other anti-LGBTI hate crimes of which a more specific breakdown was not available.
The breakdown of offences under this category was not available.
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) published relevant recommendations in its "Concluding observations on the tenth periodic report of Sweden".
The United Nations Committee against Torture (CAT) published relevant recommendations in its "Concluding observations on the eighth report of Sweden".
ODIHR recognizes Sweden's efforts in addressing hate crimes in a comprehensive manner as well as the submitted information on the overall hate crime situation in the country. However, based on the available information, it observes that Sweden has not reported data on hate crimes recorded by judiciary to ODIHR. Otherwise, ODIHR observes that Sweden has met most of its OSCE commitments on hate crime.
ODIHR recalls that in the Ministerial Council Decision 9/09, participating States have committed to collecting reliable data and statistics in sufficient detail on hate crimes and to reporting such crimes periodically to ODIHR. ODIHR stands ready to support Sweden in meeting its relevant commitments through the provision of comprehensive resources and tailored assistance.
In addition to incidents summarized below, this graph includes 1 hate incident reported by Kantor Center as statistics.