Facts and Findings:

• In the United Kingdom, in a new trend, antisemitic attacks on persons doubled in 2004 over 2003; in France, antisemitic incidents rose 63 percent in the same time period.

• In the Netherlands, 174 attacks on Muslims and immigrants were recorded during the one month following the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's murder in November 2004. Two hundred and fifty-four similar incidents had been recorded for all of 2003.

• Of the 17,000 state and local law enforcement agencies participating in its last survey of the United States' Uniform Crime Reporting system, almost 90 percent either reported that no hate crimes occurred or opted out of reporting altogether.

• In France, violent hate crimes against gay men more than doubled from 2002 to 2003. Legislation was enacted to enhance penalties for anti-gay crimes following the January 2004 attempted murder of Sebastian Nouchet, a gay man who nearly died after being set on fire with gasoline.

• The Russian political climate, particularly after the atrocities at the Beslan school in 2004, has become increasingly xenophobic. Local authorities and police regularly conduct random police round-ups and beatings of people from the Caucasus region. Gangs of roving extremists routinely attack ethnic Chechens, Dagestanis, and Tajiks.

• Violent attacks on Roma (Gypsy) communities are an everyday occurrence in most Eastern European countries. Police are said to have stood by as attacks were carried out, or even to have taken part in the attacks.

Cases:

• In Russia, a group of armed skinheads attacked an ethnic Tajik family on February 9, 2004, in Moscow, stabbed a nine-year-old girl to death, and severely injured her father and eleven-year-old cousin.

In Greece, in April 2005, a nationally prominent lawyer attacked a leading gay rights activist in a central Athens square while shouting anti-gay epithets. Before the physical assault, the lawyer had verbally attacked the activist on television for his advocacy of gay rights.

In Toulon, France, unknown assailants threw a Molotov cocktail at a Jewish community center and synagogue in March 2004. In all, 6 French synagogues were targeted in arson attacks and 16 were desecrated in 2004; 6 Jewish schools were vandalized; and 15 cemeteries and monuments were desecrated.

In Germany, in July 2002, three young members of an extreme right-wing organization beat a sixteen-year-old learning-disabled boy to death, shouting antisemitic epithets, mistakenly believing him to be Jewish.

In the United States, a severely mentally retarded man was kidnapped, choked, beaten, burned with cigarettes, taped to a chair, and then abandoned in a forest in New Jersey. Eight people were subsequently tried and convicted in 2001 for the crime in one of the first prosecutions of a disability-based hate crime in the United States. Physical and mental disabilities had been added as protected classes to New Jersey's hate crime law just months before the attack.

Only 19 of the 55 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) member states have enacted legislation expressly punishing crimes motivated by racism.

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