Portugal

How hate crime data is collected

Entries on all the police forces' incident reporting forms include the legal basis of recorded incidents, the characteristics of the incident, the victims and the perpetrators, as well as information about the time and place of the incident. The database of the Criminal Police already enables the flagging of potential hate crimes and capture bias motivation. There is a Manual for data collection that provides guidance for police officers when registering crimes for statistical purposes (the criminal classification of crimes). All police forces are obliged to fill out crime reports according to the Manual and send these to the Ministry of Justice's statistical department (DSEJI) every month.

The Ministry of Justice is responsible for the centralized collection processes and for producing reliable criminal statistics. Statistics are recorded by police forces, the Public Prosecutors Services and Judicial Courts. The data gathered by the three main police forces (the Criminal Police, the Police of Public Security, and the National Republican Guard) need to be transferred from the processing systems of these entities to the justice statistical information system of the Ministry of Justice. The collection of statistical data on proceedings pending before the courts is fully automated. The data is communicated to the Directorate General for Justice Policy via an automatic interface with Citius, the information system for first instance courts.

Portugal is undertaking efforts to improve their methodology with the aim of producing comparable data, particularly on hate crimes. These efforts include implementing standards set out by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights and ODIHR, in particular ensuring that an incident is identified as a potential hate crime in the IT systems of the three main police forces. The Ministry of Justice statistics already allow for a breakdown of the crimes of murder, serious assault/grievous bodily harm, threats, coercion, stalking, forced marriage and its preparatory acts for offences motivated by racial hatred or bias against the victim's skin colour. The need to collect information on other possible bias motivations and on the motivation of other crimes has already been identified and proposed as a possible change to implement in the Citius.