The Office for Human Rights and the Rights of National Minorities, together with the Judicial Academy, carried out set of hate crimes workshops for members of the judiciary, police, prosecuting authorities and civil society organizations. During the workshops, participants studied the relevant case of the European Court of Human Rights, notably Šečić v. Croatia and Škorjanec v. Croatia, as well as Balázs v. Hungary, Grigoryan and Sergeyeva v. Ukraine, Milanović v. Serbia, Nachova and Others v. Bulgaria, among others. In 2019, a second round of workshops were carried out for 109 participants. In order to improve the hate crime data collection system, the Working Group on the Drafting of the Protocol on Hate Crime began drafting a New Protocol, which should be adopted by the end of 2020. The New Protocol on Hate Crime aims to ensure the collection of relevant statistical data, while also: defining the obligations of individual institutions dealing with hate crime; determining the responsibilities of the competent authorities involved in detecting, treating and monitoring the results of procedures conducted in hate crime cases; and defining specific forms for statistical collecting data on hate crime cases.
In its fifth report on Croatia, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) observed that many cases of hate crime, especially those targeting Serbs, LGBT people and Roma, are only classified as misdemeanours. ECRI recommended that the bias motive be incorporated from the very beginning in investigations and training for police officers and judicial officials.
ODIHR observes that Croatia has not made public hate crime data disaggregated by bias motivation.
The Criminal Code provision defining hate crimes was amended to include language as a protected characteristic.
The Action Plan for Implementation of the National Plan to Combat Discrimination 2017-2019 was adopted by the Government, which identifies a number of priority areas in addressing hate crimes: education and public awareness raising initiatives focusing on hate crimes against national minorities and LGBT people, and improvements to hate crime data collection.
Links
[1] https://hatecrime.osce.org/node/804/csv
[2] https://hatecrime.osce.org/node/649/csv
[3] https://hatecrime.osce.org/igo/european-commission-against-racism-and-intolerance-ecri
[4] https://hatecrime.osce.org/what-hate-crime/racism-and-xenophobia
[5] https://hatecrime.osce.org/what-hate-crime/bias-against-roma-and-sinti
[6] https://hatecrime.osce.org/what-hate-crime/bias-against-other-groups-sexual-orientation-or-gender-identity