2007 Hate Crime Survey - Executive Summary

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In April, in the Russian Federation, a gunman shot and killed Lampsar Samba, a student from Senegal, with a hunting rifle as he left a night club in St. Petersburg with a group of other African students. The weapon, emblazoned with a swastika, was found near the scene of the crime.

In May, in Belgium, an anti-immigrant fanatic murdered a pregnant Malian au pair and the two-year old Belgian infant in her charge, just moments after having shot and seriously wounded a woman of Turkish origin wearing a Muslim headscarf.

In July, in Latvia's capital Riga, anti-gay demonstrators hurled feces and eggs at gay rights activists and their supporters who were taking part in a gay pride event.

In October, in Ukraine, five men attacked and murdered an oil company professional of Nigerian origin.

These were some of the incidents that helped bring the issue of hate crimes to the public eye in 2006, although the rising tide of such violence continues to go largely unreported. Perpetrators of hate crimes persistently target individuals who stand out because of their real or perceived ethnic origin, race, nationality, religion, or such attributes as disability or sexual orientation. This violence is driven by discrimination that often involves multiple factors, including the double discrimination of racism and gender, physical appearance and religion.

Events to which members of particular groups can be tied, however tenuously, sometimes serve as a precipitant for large-scale racist, antisemitic, and related violence. In situations of conflict, members of minority populations perceived by the majority as the kin of its foreign enemies are often held collectively responsible for the acts of distant governments, political groups, or even individuals. In the Russian Federation, for example, the long conflict with Chechen separatists has as a corollary the stigmatization of Chechens and other people from the Caucasus throughout the country. In August, in the small northwestern Russian town of Kondopoga, a brawl in a restaurant between persons of ethnic Russian and Chechen background left two Russians dead and set off what many have described as a pogrom against people of Caucasian origin there.

Elsewhere in Europe and North America, authors of antisemitic threats and attacks frequently invoke Israel and Israeli policies as justification even while employing the language and symbols of Nazi Germany. Discrimination and violent attacks against Muslims follow a similar pattern, with attacks on ordinary people in their shops, schools, or homes serving as substitutes for those keen to lash back at Islamist terrorism. Assaults are often accompanied by epithets directed at Muslim terrorists or the organization Al Qaeda, as if every Muslim was accountable for the acts of every other. The London bombings on July 7, 2005 were followed by a backlash against people perceived to be Muslims, resulting in a month-long surge of hate crimes directed at people of South Asian and Middle Eastern origin.

This survey looks in more detail at a few European countries - France, Germany, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom, where violent hate crimes have been on the rise in recent years and where official or nongovernmental monitoring systems allow for a more comprehensive analysis of trends. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, governments have made serious efforts to combat hate crimes in recent years, although more needs to be done.

In France, authorities reported in 2006 a decrease by 10 percent in the overall number of hatehate crime offenses overall remains extraordinarily high compared with the late 1990s. crimes in comparison with 2005. However antisemitic offenses rose by 6.6 percent in the same period. The number of

In Germany, early estimates for 2006 on the number of extremist crimes suggest the highest level of such crimes since the current monitoring system was introduced in 2001. These figures continue an upward trend over the last several years. The severity of the problem was highlighted in the run-up to the World Cup, hosted by Germany, in which community and activist groups produced a "No-Go" guide for German minorities and foreign citizens that identified areas with high incidences of racist violence.

In the Russian Federation, hate crimes against ethnic, religious, and national minorities have proliferated. According to a leading monitor, there were at least 31 racist murders in 2005 and hate-based attacks on 413 individuals. Those numbers rose significantly in 2006 to 540 cases of violent hate crimes, including 54 murders, sustaining a steady trend of rising violence over the past several years. Nongovernmental monitors have noted that prosecutors have begun to more frequently use hate crime laws in the prosecution of these cases. Yet in 2006 national and international attention was drawn to several prominent cases in which all defendants were acquitted or given lenient sentences on "hooliganism" charges.

In Ukraine, information from nongovernmental sources has shown that violent antisemitism is on the rise, while racist violence toward people of African origins and other minorities has had increasingly lethal consequences.

In the United Kingdom, a dramatic surge of racist and religiously-motivated violence followed the July 7, 2005 bombings in the London Underground and a city bus. Religiously-motivated hate crimes rose by as much as 600 percent in London in the month following these bombings. Overall in 2006, hate crimes in the United Kingdom continued at a historically high rate.

Prejudice based on race, ethnicity, and national origin continue to be among the principle driving forces behind hatred and intolerance. Racial and ethnic minorities have been under particular threat in many parts of Europe, with particularly lethal violence reported in areas of the former Soviet Union. A range of groups face threats of discriminatory violence. They include Jews and Muslims, who confront virulent combinations of racism and religious intolerance, the Roma and Sinti, and minority Christian faiths in the Russian Federation, Turkey, and the Central Asian republics. Less attention has been paid to the reality of disability-based discrimination and violence, and the phenomenon of violence motivated by bias founded on sexual orientation, although these forms of intolerance are no less devastating to the victims and their communities.

Preface | Executive Summary | Introduction | Recommendations | Causes and Consequences | Statistics and Trends: A Review of Select Countries | Thematic Overview: Hate Crime Genres  | End Notes