2007 Hate Crime Survey - Thematic Overview: Hate Crime Genres

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Introduction

Race, ethnicity, and national origin have long been prominent among the 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. People of African origin have been under particular threat there and elsewhere in Europe.

In the Russian Federation, people of African origin have been the object of some of the most persistent and serious attacks, with African students in particular subject to everyday threats of violence. Although there are a relatively small number of people of African origin in eastern Europe and Russia, they are among the most visible and thus most vulnerable of minorities.

On April 7, 2006 in St. Petersburg, a gunman shot Lampsar Samba, a student from Senegal, with a hunting rifle as he left a night club with a group of other African students. The weapon, emblazoned with a swastika, was found near the scene of the crime.[89]Just a few weeks before, on March 25, also in St. Petersburg, nine-year old Lilian Sisoko, a Russian citizen of mixed heritage (the daughter of an ethnic Russian woman and a Malian man), was stabbed in the neck and ear three times by two young men as she was entering her apartment building. She managed to get back to her apartment, where her parents called for an ambulance in which she was rushed to the hospital.[90]

In Ukraine, men of African origin were murdered in at least two apparent hate crimes in 2006, including Dr. Godknows Miemi, an oil company worker of Nigerian origin, in October, and a Gambian student Lamin Jarjue, who was killed in December."[91] In the wake of Dr. Godknows Miemi's murder, Pastor Sandey Adelazha, a Protestant minister in Kiev, told the press that "African embassies receive complaints every week from their citizens who have been attacked."[92]

In Poland's northern city of Olsztyn, at least four men attacked Moroccan actor Abdel M. on July 22, 2006 at an antiracism festival, hitting him over the head with a bottle and stabbing him repeatedly. Abdel M., a member of the Migrator troupe of refugee actors, had just finished a performance about the life of refugees in Poland when he was attacked. The attackers reportedly told him they attacked him because "you are dark, you are black" and "there are too many foreigners."[93] 

Polish Radio cited Olsztyn police commissioner Jolanta Szymulewska Ozioro as denying claims of a racist attack. "The four men in custody didn't belong to any specific organization like skins or any nationalist groups. They have criminal records and are known to police. According to our investigation it doesn't seem at the moment that it was a racial attack.' [94]

The Cameroonian head of the troupe of actors described his own experience of increasing "violent, bitter attacks on foreigners," in particular people of African origin. "I have been here for two years. The situation is getting more and more [serious] because personally I have been attacked on several occasions. I have met some of my friends, some of them who are black, and they have been complaining that they have been attacked by racists."[95]

In Belgium, in the city of Bruges, on the night of May 6, 2006, five right-wing skinheads viciously attacked Raphaël Mensah, a 50-year-old Parisian artist of Togolese descent and his 37 year-old Belgian friend, Alain Bouillon, who was also wounded. According to Bouillon "the skinheads weren't after money, they went after us because my friend has the wrong skin color." Mensah's wallet was reportedly recovered on the crime scene with the 150 euros he carried on him still in it.[96] Mensah spent two months in a coma, and died in a Paris hospital in April 2007. The Belgian judicial system is waiting for the results of an autopsy to determine if Mensah's death was a result of the beating. The three individuals in detention in connection with the attack may be charged with murder.[97]

In Germany, on April 18, 2006, in the lead up to the World Cup an attack in Potsdam left a German citizen of Ethiopian descent, Ermyas Mulugeta, in a coma for more than a month. Thousands took part in street protests in the wake of the incident, which brought the threat of racist violence against some of the hundreds of thousands of expected foreign visitors to the forefront of German public life.[98] International attention was guaranteed when former government spokesmen Uwe-Karsten Heye, who now chairs an antiracism organization, warned of "no-go areas" for World Cup visitors in the state of Brandenburg and elsewhere "where I would not advise anyone with a different skin color to go," adding: "They would probably not get out alive."[99]

In the United States, violent attacks against racial minorities continue to comprise a majority of all hate crimes. According to the FBI's annual Hate Crime Statistics, more than 50 percent of all hate incidents constituting crimes since 2002 have been motivated by animus towards the victim's race.[100] The current threat of violence facing racial minorities is a modern extension of a dark history of hate-motivated violence and bigotry against non-white persons in the United States. Both official and unofficial statistics continue to underscore this threat. According to the FBI's annual hate crime statistics, African-Americans continue to be the most vulnerable to hate-motivated violence. In 2005, of the 4,895 victims of race-motivated incidents, 67.9 percent were victims of "anti-black bias."[101] This statistic mirrors those from previous years, where anti-black violence comprised roughly two-thirds of all race-motivated incidents tabulated by the FBI.[102]

• In Palm Springs, California, on April 5, 2007, a female white supremacist gang member allegedly beat and stabbed a 20-year-old black man and a 20-year-old black woman with a knife behind a local Starbucks, leaving both victims with multiple stab wounds. The female victim suffered two collapsed lungs. Authorities believe the attacker was motivated by racial animus towards the victims.[103]

• In Long Beach, California, in May 2005, a 66-year-old landlord beat a 17-year-old African-American girl with a garden hose. The beating reportedly followed weeks of harassment and intimidation against the victim and her father. The landlord allegedly yelled racial slurs towards the two on a routine basis, and hung a stuffed-monkey with a noose around its neck on the family's banister, with a sign that read "I.M. LYNCHED."[104] In March 2007, a jury found the suspect guilty of assault and battery and upheld hate crime charges against her based in part on her use of racial slurs.[105]

• In Lacy, Washington, on January 26, 2007, three United States Army Rangers from Fort Lewis beat a 36-year-old African-American man outside a bar while hurling racist epithets during the assault. The suspect suffered bruises and cuts and was briefly hospitalized before being released. The three attackers were arrested for second-degree assault and were charged with malicious harassment under Washington State 's hate crime statute.[106]

The situation of other groups that face particular threats of discriminatory violence are described in more detail further below, in the thematic overview section. They include Jews and Muslims, who confront virulent combinations of racism and religious intolerance, the Roma and Sinti, a minority present in most European nations, and minority Christian faiths in the Russian Federation, Turkey, and the Central Asian republics. In addition, we address the reality of disability-based discrimination and violence, and the phenomenon of violence motivated by bias founded on sexual orientation, often known as homophobia. Separate "companion surveys" cover in greater depth antisemitism, Islamophobia, and homophobia.

Antisemitism

Antisemitism, a particularly pernicious form of racism and religious intolerance, has persisted at a high level throughout Europe and North America, while tending to surge in response to international events involving Israel. Attacks that are directly tied to the Middle East conflict are an important part of this picture, with some political groups indiscriminately targeting Jews everywhere for violence as if proxies for Israel. Europeans and immigrants alike have invoked the Middle East conflict to demonize Jews as a people and to incite racist violence against individual Jews regardless of their views on or relationship to Israel. Terrorist attacks such as the Istanbul synagogue bombings of November 2003 have illustrated the potential extremes of violence intended to give voice to enmity towards Israel.

More recently, a gunman directed automatic rifle-fire at an Oslo synagogue, Norway's largest, on September 29, 2006. Four men arrested for the attack were subsequently held on multiple charges, including terrorism, and were accused also of plotting the assassination of the Israeli ambassador and bombings of the Israeli and U.S. embassies.[107] The synagogue attack occurred in the context of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, and followed months of incidents in which the synagogue was targeted in part as a means to express hatred for Israel.[108] It was daubed with graffiti, the community's cantor was physically attacked, and in one incident captured on security cameras, a man defecated on the synagogue steps and then broke two windows with stones.[109]

In 2006 as in previous years, antisemitic discourse concerning Israel has often been a major factor in antisemitic violence. The blurring of criticism of a nation or a government into racism and religious intolerance is a common feature in times of armed conflict and heightened international tensions, particularly when building upon deep foundations of hatred and prejudice. But this convergence and merging of ancient prejudices and political animosity has been particularly widespread and acute with regard to Israel, and has become a persistent feature of antisemitic discourse. This form of discourse becomes racism and religious hatred, and antisemitism, when critics of Israel vilify and demonize Jews as a people, and every Jew everywhere. As a British community organization noted, this is often the case:

Messages that start out as attacks on alleged Israeli policy or behavior often conclude with abuse of, or threats to, all Jews, the wish that all Jews were dead, claims of Jewish conspiracy or the accusation that Jews killed Christ. The antisemitism is compounded if the incident is targeted at a Jewish person or institution - such as a synagogue - that is then held responsible for the alleged actions of the Israeli government. This charge of collective responsibility and collective guilt, whereby every Jew in the world is supposedly answerable for the behavior of every other Jew, is one of the fundamental building blocks of all racism.[110]

But modern antisemitism is multifaceted and deep-rooted, a combination of racism and religious intolerance, and cannot be viewed as a transitory side-effect of the conflict in the Middle East. Antisemitic incitement and violence in Europe and North America both predated the Middle East conflict and continues to flourish based on centuries old sources of hatred and prejudice. The age-old demonization of Jews as a people, not least as supposed world conspirators and as scapegoats for both ancient and modern ills, remains a powerful underlying factor in the irrational hatreds of antisemitism today.

The growing nationalist extremist movements of Europe are steeped in the most primitive ideologies of antisemitism, and share a hatred and commitment to violence toward both Europe's Jewish communities and Muslim and other minorities. Often, an antisemitic attack will have no apparent link to organized extremist movements, but will be no less lethal for being a random assault by ordinary people steeped in antisemitism. In Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, for example, a group of young men shouting antisemitic slogans and brandishing bottles attacked three Orthodox Jewish men on December 16, 2006, injuring one severely, as well as a passerby who came to their aid. The three had just left a service at a synagogue in the city's Podol district.[111]

Sometimes violence against Jews forms part of a larger pattern of racism, notably in European football (soccer) violence. On the night of November 23, 2006, in the aftermath of a match in France between Paris Saint-Germain and Israel's Tel Aviv Hapoel on the outskirts of Paris, some 150 local fans shouting "kill the Jews," and "the dirty Jew must die" attacked 25-year-old Yanniv Hazout, a Frenchman who is Jewish.[112] The incident received national and international prominence in part because a black police officer, Antoine Granomort, rushed to Hazout's aid - and one alleged attacker was killed. Granomort reportedly first used teargas to fend off kicks and punches from the mob and then fired his revolver, killing one of the alleged attackers.[113]

"The crowd hurled insults - ‘dirty Jew,' ‘dirty negro' and monkey cries - and raised Nazi salutes," the state prosecutor, Jean-Claude Marin, said afterward.... According to [former Interior Minister] Sarkozy, some fans shouted, "Death to the Jew!" before attacking Hazout. When the crowd began kicking and beating Granomort and apparently threatened to kill the fan he was protecting, he fired his service revolver, killing 25-year-old Julien Quemener, a home-appliance technician, and wounding 26-year-old Mounir Boujaer, a truck driver....

The response of senior public authorities was to stress the importance of eradicating racism and antisemitism in football. Then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, demanded action even if meant barring spectators. After meeting with soccer officials and representatives of fans, he told the press "We prefer to see stands that are empty than full of unwanted people." "We no longer want racists, Nazi salutes, monkey noises in stadiums. Soccer is not war."[114]

The multiple strands of ancient and modern antisemitism can also come together in particular surges of violence, when perpetrators motivated by the traditional hatreds of antisemitism associated with the European extreme right make common cause with minority populations concerned with the Middle East. Events that set these particular surges in motion may mean different things to different people, but combine to reinforce preexistent prejudices and hatred.[115]

Violence against Muslims

Anti-immigrant bias and xenophobia and old-fashioned racism have been major contributing factors to the modern phenomenon of anti-Muslim discrimination and violence. Often termed Islamophobia, this combination of racism and religious intolerance has been fueled by government policies and practices and by partisan politics. Popular concerns over national security, cultural integrity, economic prosperity, and religious homogeneity are all underlying factors in this newly potent form of xenophobia.

The rise of racist and religious violence against Muslims in Europe has occurred in tandem with the adoption of anti-immigrant political platforms by both fringe and mainstream political movements that are charged with racism. This new climate of chauvinism and xenophobia has made immigrants and those of immigrant origin particularly vulnerable to scapegoating for a broad range of social ills and political dilemmas. A result has been heightened anxiety and rising violence against racial, ethnic, and religious minorities and a new climate of exclusion. Citizens and non-citizens alike who are identified as Muslims have in particular been disparaged, discriminated against, and singled out for violence.

In western Europe, the attribution of acts of terrorism to Islamist extremists has continued to be a pivotal factor in backlash violence based on race and religion, targeting people who are perceived to be linked by reason of kinship, religion, nationality, or ideology with the perpetrators of the atrocities. Again, the racist principle was invoked to arbitrarily hold people responsible for the actions of others, related to them only by the color of their skin, their religion, or their national origins.

Racist violence against people of Middle East or Asian origin who are thought rightly or wrongly to be Muslims builds upon preexistent racism and xenophobia that is both exacerbated and given an outlet in times of public distress over terrorist outrages. Crimes now seen to be fueled by Islamophobia may often be almost indistinguishable with the racist violence that occurred against the same minority communities in the past in which religion was but a minor factor.

A distinction between racism and Islamophobia is often an artificial one, as the two generally tend to blur together in the reality of modern Europe. Yet Islamophobia is a new and potent factor in the modern stew of racism and anti-immigrant bias. As a recent report by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) noted, "[d]iscrimination against Muslims can be attributed to Islamophobic attitudes, as much as to racist and xenophobic resentments, as these elements are in many cases inextricably intertwined."[116] (In March 2007 the EUMC became the E.U. Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA)).

The true number of hate crimes committed against Muslims in Europe, and members of minorities often mistaken for Muslims, is unknown. Even where governments themselves monitor and report hate crimes, there is broad acceptance that such crimes are both underreported and often, when reported, unrecorded.

Monitoring of discrimination against Muslims is still not a priority in most of the countries of the OSCE. Only the United Kingdom and the United States systematically record data on anti-Muslim crimes, although some official French data is also available. Elsewhere, the norm is that police either do not register reported incidents, register incidents without the details from which a motive of hatred and prejudice can be identified, or register incidents in the general category of xenophobic violence. Even where hate crimes are systematically registered, anti-Muslim crimes that involve the double discrimination of racism and religious prejudice may be recorded as single bias incidents motivated by either racism or anti-Muslim bias, the real level of violence against Muslims accordingly understated.

Underreporting is often particularly acute when a minority community lacks confidence in public authorities, or ready access to public complaints channels. These are problems confronted both by Muslim nationals of many countries as well as recent immigrants. Immigrants of uncertain status in their countries of residence may in particular suffer discrimination and violence in silence, having no means to seek public support without risking further abuse from police or the threat of deportation.[117] Facilities for third-party reporting, through which victims and their families can recur to a trusted organization or to a civil agency as an intermediary with public authorities, have been established in the United Kingdom but are available in few other countries.

A December 2006 EUMC report on Muslims in the European Union concluded that the incidence of Islamophobia in the E.U.'s then 25 countries, from verbal threats to physical attacks on people and property, was both under-documented and underreported. It points out that just one E.U. country, the United Kingdom, publishes criminal justice data that identifies Muslims as victims of hate crimes. The report lists scores of cases of hate crimes against Muslims, ranging from attacks on mosques to assaults on women wearing Islamic headscarves.[118]

The EUMC report highlights the importance of responding constructively to the stereotypes and generalizations that surround any discussion of Europe's Muslim minorities.

A series of events such as the September 11 terrorist attacks against the US, the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, the Madrid and London bombings and the debate on the Prophet Mohammed cartoons have given further prominence to the situation of Muslim communities. The central question is how to avoid stereotypical generalizations, how to reduce fear and how to strengthen cohesion in our diverse European societies while countering marginalization and discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion or belief.[119]

An August 2006 report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE's) Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) also addressed both contemporary manifestations of anti-Muslim discrimination and violence and its roots.

Hatred and intolerance towards Muslims has increasingly been given expression through violent physical attacks, burning or vandalism of mosques and Islamic schools, verbal harassment and threats, and calls for Muslims to be deported or expelled from Europe. Incidents against Muslims are fuelled by a combination of racism, hostility towards Islam and its adherents, powerful anti-immigrant sentiment and the association of Muslims and Islam with terrorism.[120]

The perpetrators of anti-Muslim discrimination are often inspired by virulently nationalist, chauvinist, and racist ideologies that make little distinction between the minorities that are the object of their hatred. Those who espouse violent anti-immigrant views may find their prejudices exacerbated with regard to immigrants of the Muslim faith, but the fusion of racism and religious intolerance may in practice express a more generalized hatred of the "other" who stands out as different. This generalized intolerance may be expressed in multiple ways. The desecration of graves reported in Allied military cemeteries in Europe in recent years, for example, has involved the daubing of swastikas on and systematic smashing of both Muslim and Jewish tombstones.[121]

Similarly, in recent incidents expressions of anti-Muslim hatred and violence were sometimes also accompanied by antisemitic screeds. In the United Kingdom, a British National Party supporter was sentenced to five years imprisonment for daubing antisemitic and racist graffiti on a Swindon mosque - including "Pakistanis and Jews go back to Auschwitz" - and then firebombing it in August 2006.[122]

Antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents in the Russian Federation coincided on at least one occasion. On the night of September 23, 2006 in Yaroslavl, a group described as skinheads attacked a mosque during a service marking the beginning of Ramadan, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the building and smashing the windows of nearby parked cars before police came to the scene. The same night, the eve of the Jewish New Year, a group of young men chanting antisemitic slogans attacked the synagogue in Khabarovsk with rocks and bricks, breaking windows.[123]

In France, the beginning of Ramadan was similarly marked on September 23 by a series of attacks on mosques. In Quimper, in the northwest, a mosque was set alight and seriously damaged in an arson attack. Its walls were also daubed with six swastikas in what was said to have been the fourth time the mosque was targeted. On the same weekend, a mosque in Carcassone, in the southwest, was painted with the slogans "France for the French," "Arabs get out," and "Death to Islam."[124]

Official French statistics continue to identify the preponderance of incidents of racist violence as involving "anti-Maghrebine" violence and threats - hate crimes against people of North African origin (antisemitic incidents are recorded separately). In 2006, the limited record of racist violence continued to be mostly of attacks on the predominantly Muslim Maghreb community, with 42 incidents (66 percent of the total) (no further information was provided on the targets of the 22 violent incidents involving "other victims of racism"). Eleven incidents  were identified as expressly Islamaphobic, targeting places of worship, monuments, and individuals, contrasting with the 13 incidents registered as Islamophobic in 2005.

The breakdown of the 64 serious racist acts registered in France in 2006 (again, excluding antisemitic offences) includes two bombings, eight arson attacks, and 34 cases of assaults on individuals. The targets included five mosques that were attacked with explosives or arson. Three mosques were the object of vandalism as were four cemeteries or monuments. Crimes characterized as menaces included those involving graffiti and "minor vandalism," with 21 such incidents targeting mosques, 19 schools, and three cemeteries.[125]

In its December 2006 report on discrimination against Muslims in Europe, the EUMC stressed that as "[d]ata collection on anti-Muslim incidents is not obligatory," French police databases "contain only a partial account of reports where the victim's origin or religion - as Muslim - might be noted: 131 such incidents were reported in 2004 and 65 in 2005."[126]

In the United Kingdom, the July 7, 2005 London bombings triggered a wave of backlash violence against Muslims and people perceived to be Muslims, particularly in the weeks immediately after. Two weeks after the attacks, the Muslim Safety Forum, which works closely with the police monitoring the total number of incidents, said the total number of "religiously-related" attacks reported across London rose 500 percent compared with the same period last year. These attacks ranged from verbal abuse and spitting, to property damage, arson attacks, and murder. Nine mosques were attacked, a garage firebombed, people were assaulted in the street, and windows were broken in homes.[127] Among the more serious personal assaults was the attempted murder of 21-year-old Zana Osman, an Iraqi Kurdish asylum seeker who was stabbed 11 times, with wounds to his back, face, neck, chest, and abdomen.[128]

Violence based on Religious Intolerance

Hate crimes motivated by antisemitic and anti-Muslim bias, as well as bias towards other minority religions often take the form of attacks on places of worship, on religious leaders, and on individuals who are targeted for their faith while moving to or from places of worship. Religious dress or symbols can also be the basis for bias attacks.

Attacks on symbols of a particular group can also take the form of desecration, including by public displays intended to disparage and denigrate both members of particular faiths and the religions itself. More commonly, the vandalism of synagogues and mosques is accompanied by the destruction or desecration of religious articles and revered texts as well as the daubing of antisemitic or anti-Muslim slogans. In Spain, in the town of Soria, on January 26, 2006, a group publicly burned a copy of the Koran and threw other religious books in a trash can outside a mosque. [129]

In many parts of the former Soviet Union, state-sponsored hostility toward religions considered "non-traditional" continued to be reflected in a refusal to register religious congregations as religious bodies, the denial of permits to build places of worship, the disruption of services in private homes or rented premises, and a policy of indifference toward attacks on members of these independent congregations.

In the Russian Federation, official intolerance has been paralleled by the actions of extreme nationalist movements founded upon ideologies combining ethnic and religious chauvinism. The slogan "Russia for the Russians" has had both an ethnic and a religious dimension, and fueled the persecution of members of non-Orthodox believers. Members of so-called "non-traditional" Protestant and other faiths have been particular targets of abuse, even as antisemitism has been a unifying factor among nationalist groups.

On April 23, 2006, in Spassk in southern Siberia some 20 young people attacked the congregation of the Reconciliation Pentecostal Church as a children's Easter concert was about to begin, causing injuries requiring hospitalization for some as well as damaging electronic equipment. Attackers reportedly seized a microphone and denounced the congregation as "sectarians" and "demons," and declared that only Orthodox Easter was to be celebrated in Spassk. Police at the scene reportedly stood by and did nothing to halt the attack. [130]

In Serbia, assailants reportedly attacked a Hare Krishna devotee in front of his home in Jagodina on the night of June 17-18, 2006, injuring him with three stab wounds and by carving a cross on his head. The victim, who had suffered a previous attack in 2005, was hospitalized.[131] Extremists claiming to defend the Serbian Orthodox Church attacked the churches of other faiths on numerous occasions in 2006. The religious freedom organization Forum 18 has documented many of the cases:

One black spot is the town of Backa Palanka, where Seventh-day Adventist and Pentecostal churches have faced graffiti, arson and stone-throwing attacks and a Jehovah's Witness was assaulted. A newly-built Catholic church in Smederevo has faced three attacks in the past year, while Nazarene, Orthodox, Lutheran, Muslim and Mormon sites have also been attacked. On 6 September a new Islamic faculty being prepared in Novi Pazar was vandalized.[132]

Forum 18 also reported that Serbia's Jehovah's Witness community has recently sued the Serbian state for "failure to prosecute those who boasted of burning down a Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall in 1999."[133]

In Turkey, in February 2006, a young man approached Rev. Andrea Santoro, a 61-year-old Catholic priest, as he prayed in his church and shot and killed him, reportedly shouting a religious slogan to justify the killing.[134] Police said he subsequently confessed to the crime and said the killing was religiously motivated: related to the publication of Danish cartoons that were offensive to Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. Also in February, a group of young men assaulted a Franciscan priest in Izmir, who was not seriously harmed, in what also appeared to be a religiously motivated attack. The attacks occurred at the time of international protests over the publication by major European media of caricatures of the prophet Mohammed and were widely attributed to this.[135] In July, Father Pierre Brunissen, a French national, was attacked in the street in the port of Samsun and wounded with a knife.[136]

In Uzbekistan, on December 18, 2006, four attackers severely beat a member of a Pentecostal church in the capital, Tashkent, not long after the broadcast on state-run television of two widely viewed programs that demonized Protestant faiths. The attacks come in the context of longstanding state policies to limit the practice of Islam to an "official" religion of state-sponsored mosques, while subjecting to police raids, arrests, and prosecutions worshippers of independent Muslim congregations as well as members of Jehovah's Witness and Protestant faiths.[137]

Violence against Roma and Sinti

The murder of 500,000 Roma and Sinti in the Holocaust was "an experience that is burned deep in the collective memory of the Roma and Sinti minorities," writes Romani Rose, the chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, but "is still barely acknowledged by the majority in their countries of nationality.[138] The Porrajmos - literally "the Devouring" - is the Romani word for the Holocaust. Centuries of prejudice against Roma and Sinti were reinforced by anti-"gypsy" laws of exclusion long before the Third Reich.[139] Often described as Europe's largest ethnic minority, Roma and Sinti suffer discrimination and violence as part of longstanding patterns of racism and social marginalization by both the state and civil society.

Although the Roma and Sinti, like other minorities, are victims of the broad trend of racist violence throughout much of Europe, they disproportionately face the menace of violent abuse by public authorities themselves. Data on hate crimes targeting Roma and Sinti is largely unavailable, in contrast to often detailed reporting on racist violence at the hands of police authorities. Reporting on individual cases of abuse, however, regularly illustrates patterns of abuse in which combinations of state and private violence combine to terrorize and intimidate Roma communities, to exact vigilante vengeance for crimes associated with individual Roma, or to expel Roma families from their homes in towns and villages in many parts of Europe.

Although violence against Roma is most frequently reported in eastern Europe and in the countries of the former Soviet Union, hate crimes and police brutality against Roma are also a phenomenon in western Europe. In Belgium, a group of men described as skinheads reportedly attacked two young Roma men in the town of Tirlemont (Tienen) on August 26, 2006, kicking and beating them. Eighteen-year-old Peter Danyi, a Roma of Slovak origin who had lived in Belgium for ten years, was reportedly stabbed four times, but survived after emergency medical intervention. Some 250 Roma and supporters demonstrated there in solidarity on September 2.

Three alleged assailants were reportedly detained, although local authorities initially discounted charges of racism. Eddy Poffé , the newly elected mayor, reportedly told the press that "Tirlemont is not a racist town, and we have no problems here." His predecessor, Marcel Logist, told the press: "I doubt that this was a racist act. This was just a scuffle between young people"[140] Peter Danyi's sister responded to a question on what had provoked the attack:

In fact, nothing caused it. Except a clearly racist attitude of "chase the foreigner." ... We knew the same thing in Slovakia when we were younger. The young people always had to be alert for places where there were skinheads. Also we avoided these places. Or then, if they came in the district, we stayed inside.[141]

A climate of repression and racist violence contributes to the effect of formal policies of some national and local authorities to deny Roma the enjoyment of rights to education, employment, and access to social services. Roma in many parts of Europe continue be the threatened by pogroms intended to drive whole communities from their homes, with houses firebombed and threatening mobs backed by police.

In the Slovak Republic, the public response to racist attacks on Roma families sometimes portrayed the violence as the product of tit for tat attacks by Roma and skinhead groups where each was equally to blame. In September 2006, a group of two dozen skinheads in Orlova attacked the home of a Roma family on a housing estate, injuring four residents, including a 15-year-old girl whose head was cut. The next day, according to police spokesmen, two Roma men attacked two Slovak girlfriends of the skinheads in retaliation: the Roma were subsequently detained. Police said the men shouted racist insults at the girls, while holding weapons, but that no physical violence occurred. Police spokesmen said "attackers from both camps" would be prosecuted, and five skinheads and the two Roma men were subsequently charged with "defamation of race and nation, rioting and bodily harm." [142]

The Slovak courts also acted in 2006 in a case of racist assault against a Roma couple carried out three years before. Three young men had been accused of entering the couple's apartment "under the pretext of being policemen" and then assaulting both, permanently injuring the eye of a pregnant women who was struck with a cobblestone, and stabbing her husband. A local court had given the perpetrators suspended sentences in January 2004, which generated wide scale protests. The case was reopened on appeal and in August 2006 verdicts were handed down: one was sentenced to three years and three months imprisonment, a second to three years of imprisonment, while a third was given a three year suspended sentence.[143]

In the Russian Federation, there have been numerous incidents in which Roma families have been harassed and subjected to violence, often with the complicity of local authorities, with a view to driving them from their homes and communities.

• In the Siberian town of Iskitim, Roma families have been subjected to repeated violent attacks. In a series of incidents there in 2004 and early 2005, assailants attacked Roma homes with a dozen or more arson attacks, forcibly expelling Roma families. A new round of violence followed the return of part of the Roma population to Iskitim late in 2005. On November 10, 2005, the home of the Zaikova family was firebombed in a renewed series of attacks. Angela Zaikova, an eight-year old Roma girl, was set alight in her bed and died in hospital soon afterward with burns over most of her body. Her mother was also terribly burned.

• In the city of Volzhsky in the Volgograd region, on April 13, 2006, a group of 10 to 20 youths armed with metal poles and wooden stakes attacked a group of eight Roma near their home. They killed one member of the local Roma community, Grigory Markenkov, and Galina Ponamareva, an ethnic Russian who was visiting, while seriously injuring a 14-year-old girl and an 80-year-old woman.[144] In contrast to other incidents, Volzhsky police detained nine suspects in the crime soon afterwards, and charges were brought of murder with racist motives against two men, with lesser charges not involving racist motives brought against the others.[145] A jury was selected on April 10, 2007 and subsequently began hearing sides in the case.[146]

• In Belgorod, in late September 2006, a district court convicted eleven young men on charges of hooliganism, aggravated assault with a racist motive, and forming an extremist group (the "Belgorod National Corps") in relation to an attack on a Roma family a month earlier on August 25. Sentences ranged from five years for the leader of the group, a former student at the Belgorod police academy, and from one and a half to four years for his co-defendants. [147] The charges were based on an attack on the home of the Nikolaenkos family on the outskirts of the town:

Acting with malicious forethought, the extremists placed a sign reading "Road Closed" on the Nikolaenkos' street in order to isolate their home from any witnesses. They then threw a firebomb and a smoke canister into the house and waited until the family members came out. The teenage son of the home's owner ran out first and was stabbed multiple times, including once in the neck. His father and mother were then beaten with metal rods (the mother's arm was broken in three places). The attackers were arrested within a week.[148]

According to the prosecution, the men were part of an extremist group formed expressly to force non-Russians from the city. Defense lawyers argued that the attack was not motivated by racism, however, but was intended to punish the Roma family for "drug dealing" - in line with a common anti-Roma stereotype of criminality that is widely promoted in the Russian Federation. Police investigators confirmed that the allegations against the family were groundless.[149]

In the Ukraine, discrimination against Roma was also reported to include large scale racist violence by public authorities, notably in the course of mass roundups and house searches that target Roma alone. In its December 2006 report, the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) concluded that "police throughout Ukraine have failed to protect Roma from extreme forms of violence, including pogroms. When such acts have taken place, police and prosecutors and judicial authorities have failed to provide due remedy to victims. These failures are long-standing."[150] The same source attributes the violence against Roma in the Ukraine to a combination of factors, including public authorities that are tolerant of expressions of hatred, racist discourse in the public sphere, the involvement of police in human rights abuses of Roma, and impunity for perpetrators.[151]

The ERRC submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the U.N. body that monitors compliance by states parties to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, described a background to violence and hatred that included state support for racist stereotypes of Roma, reinforced by widely known discrimination and violence by police and public authorities, including mass round-ups and house-to-house searches that target every Roma family in a locality.[152]

Incidents reported in 2006 include:

• On April 29, six men shouting "dirty gypsy" beat Romani Albert Kondi with metal bars near his home in Uzhgorod in the Zakarpatia region. The attackers told him "we'll destroy all of you" if he did not hand over his valuables. A woman who came to his assistance was also injured, a bottle broken over her head.[153] Although a formal complaint was made to the police, investigations were reported suspended in June 2006.[154]

• In May, in the village of Grebenki, in the Kyiv region, a non-Roma man was killed in a fight by a Roma, leading the family of the dead man to gather supporters within the village to seek vengeance against the Roma community as a whole. The group approached village authorities "to declare their intention to forcibly expel all Roma from the village and to burn their houses down." The mayor reportedly stopped the mob action, but agreed to take other measures with a view to driving the Roma from Grebenki, including cutting electricity to the Roma homes.[155]

Notwithstanding evidence to the contrary, the government of the Ukraine, in May 2006, asserted in a formal statement that observance of the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Ukraine "confirms that all forms of discrimination based on race and nationality have been eliminated in Ukraine."[156] At the same time, the government was aware of international attention to the situation of Roma there, adding in a subsequent clause that "representatives of the Roma national minority are not always in agreement with this fact."[157] The statement was made in Ukraine's periodic submission to Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination , as a state party to the convention.

In Slovenia, the forced expulsion of a large Roma extended family was reported, when Roma on the edge of the village of Ambrus, near the capital Ljubljana, were threatened by a mob after a non-Roma was injured in a fight. On October 23, 2006, hundreds of villagers gathered, in the presence of police, and called for violence to expel the Roma from the area; the meeting was broadcast on national television.[158] A mob went to the Roma settlement shouting "gypsies out," according to press reports.[159] Fires were set, and the over 30 Roma, mostly members of the Strojan family, fled. One of them was quoted declaring that "They were building bonfires on our land and shouting that if we don't move out, they will bomb us and crucify our children."[160] One villager, pensioner Joze Lindic, reportedly told a reporter "Some 600 of us gathered near their house. We wanted to burn and destroy everything but we came too late, the police were already deployed."[161]

In the face of mob action, the Roma fled into the forest, where they remained sheltering under plastic tarps for several days. On attempting to return to their homes on October 28, under police protection, they were again turned away by some 200 villagers who asserted that they would never be allowed to return. Police subsequently barred access to the former homes of the Roma, and the Roma were relocated to refugee housing. National authorities sought to relocate the Roma permanently out of the Ambrus area, but faced further protests from local people where relocation was considered. In November, the Council of Europe's Human Rights Commissioner, Thomas Hammarberg, visited Slovenia and criticized the forced relocation as "unacceptable." He called upon both political and religious leaders to speak out against xenophobia and racism, declaring that: "They have a particular obligation to stand up for human rights and tell people that minorities also have rights and that mob activities against minorities cannot be tolerated."[162]

In late November 2006, after continuing international protests, a strong police escort facilitated the return of most of the Strojan family to their compound outside Ambrus after three months sharing three rooms in an army barracks in Postojna. Some one hundred villagers gathered nearby but were kept away by a strong police presence. An attempt to return the previous week was thwarted when some 1,000 villagers blocked their path.[163]

Violence based on Sexual Orientation
 

Bias crimes motivated by sexual orientation, like those motivated by antisemitism, hatred of Roma and Sinti, and disability bias have antecedents in the Holocaust. Nazi campaigns to exterminate Jews and the Roma and Sinti were accompanied by a program called "Operation T4," designed to annihilate the disabled, and by the persecution and murder of tens of thousands of Europeans identified as homosexuals.

Although homosexuals are no longer forced to wear pink triangles or openly targeted for extermination, sexual orientation is still a basis for stigmatization and oppression, often with the open support of government at some level and by influential political and religious organizations.

Bias today towards those distinguished by their minority sexual orientation is vigorously promoted by both extremist and mainstream political and religious leaders across much of Europe and North America. Continuing violence motivated by hatred and prejudice based on sexual orientation, though largely unseen, is an intimidating day to day reality for gay men and lesbians, bisexual and transgender people in many parts of many countries.  

Discrimination by reason of sexual orientation, often termed homophobia, embraces prejudices against gay men and lesbians and bi-sexual and transgender individuals, as well as those perceived to have these attributes. This form of discrimination also extends to gender identity bias, in which individuals are targeted for violence on the grounds that they do not conform to gender stereotypes in their appearance or in behavior.

Few of the OSCE participating States track and provide statistics on crimes motivated by sexual orientation bias. Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States are the countries where such monitoring is most developed, although only Sweden and the United States produce official statistics nationwide.

Victims of hate crimes driven by homophobia often face particular cultural or social obstacles to reporting attacks and threats. Attacks on lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) people may go unreported because to do so would expose an individual's sexual orientation, possibly bringing about further abuse. LGBT people may both fear additional victimization and have little confidence that the criminal justice system will act appropriately in response to criminal complaints.

Notwithstanding obstacles, incidents of homophobic hate crimes are regularly reported in the media and in reports by nongovernmental organizations in many parts of Europe and in North America. While data for all but a few countries is insufficient to determine whether levels of violence are rising or in decline, incident reports provide some basis to conclude that homophobic violence is both frequent in incidence and often of particular brutality.

• In Portugal, on February 22, 2006, a group of boys attacked and killed a homeless, Brazilian transgender woman in the city of Oporto, leaving her body to be found in a water-filled pit. The boys, who confessed to the crime, were found to have previously harassed and intimidated the victim. Although Portuguese criminal law defines some forms of bias as aggravating circumstances in the commission of homicide and assault, this does not explicitly extend to gender identity and was not invoked in the course of the prosecution of this case.[164]

• In the United States, on February 2, 2006, an 18-year-old man entered a bar in New Bedford, Massachusetts, asked a bartender whether it was a "gay bar," and then attacked men there at random, first with a hatchet and then with gunfire. One man suffered deep cuts on his head and was shot in the face, and two others were shot in the back and chest. The assailant then fled the bar and later the state, and died on February 6 following a shootout with Arkansas police who tried to arrest him. At the time, police were investigating the assault as a hate crime.[165]

Other attacks were reported in the context of actions aimed at securing the rights of LGBT persons, in particular through public demonstrations often described as "Gay Pride" marches. Gay pride parades and other events organized in a number of countries in 2006 confronted anti-gay diatribes from political leaders, poor police protection, and serious acts of violence against those taking part in the parades and events. Criminal justice officials generally responded inadequately to the violence, making some arrests, but following through with few if any criminal prosecutions of the individuals responsible for the violence.

• In the Russian Federation, mobs of skinheads, extreme nationalists, and Russian Orthodox believers chanting homophobic slogans attacked participants and observers at Moscow gay pride events on May 27. The harassment and physical assaults plagued activists both in a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Alexander Gardens and a subsequent rally outside the Moscow Mayor's office. The events went forward despite active opposition from Moscow's mayor and from Orthodox Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious leaders there. Among those who were attacked and injured as police stood by was Volker Beck, a German member of parliament.[166]

• In Romania, over a thousand people protested the Bucharest Gay Pride parade on June 3, with violent attacks injuring at least ten marchers; others were hurt as crowds who lined the route pelted the several hundred marchers with eggs, stones, and plastic bottles. Police provided only limited protection to the marchers, but made some fifty arrests of anti-gay protesters.[167]

• In Latvia's capital Riga, on July 22, anti-gay demonstrators hurled feces and eggs at gay rights activists and their supporters who were leaving a church service there on Saturday. Dozens of protesters had gathered outside the Anglican church in Riga where gay activists were attending a service that served as an alternative to a gay pride parade which authorities has banned.[168]

• In Estonia, on August 13, some 20 anti-gay protesters armed with sticks and stones attacked the estimated 500 marchers in a Gay Pride Parade in Tallinn, injuring some twelve marchers.[169]

Violence based on Disability Bias

In a few countries, legislation providing for sentence enhancement for bias crimes includes disability-based bias in these provisions. In its October 2006 report, the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) stressed "an increased need for participating States to collect data on hate crimes and violent incidents against people with disabilities...." The report states that preliminary research "suggests that a disabled person is at least one and a half times more likely to be the victim of assault or abuse than other people of similar age and gender."[170] As in the case of the double discrimination of racism and gender, gender and disability bias, too, frequently took the form of sexual violence.

Teasing or taunting disabled persons because of their physical or mental conditions often graduates into the torment of intimidation and physical violence. Often only violent physical assaults in public places will attract the attention and assistance of the public and of law enforcement, while even such actions that terrorize the disabled may be treated as minor offences. Most hate crimes against the disabled may never be reported, as they occur largely out of sight in private homes and institutions. Even the most serious crimes against the disabled, from systematic beatings to rape to burnings with cigarettes, when carried out by those responsible for their care, may never reach the criminal justice system if carried out in custodial situations. When they become known, they are often characterized as "abuse," not crimes.[171]

Crimes may be written off as abuse, or little more than teasing or pranks, even when seriously harming a disabled person. An example cited by one authority occurred in a school setting: "the schoolmates of an 18-year old North Carolina high school student with a developmental disability soaked his lunch in cleaning fluid and watched him eat it." The victim was poisoned and required hospitalization, but the incident was not treated as a crime. "Abuse is a ubiquitous metaphor for experiences of disability oppression," adds this author.[172] The disabled, like others, may also be the object of discrimination on multiple grounds, doubly victimized because of their gender, their ethnic origins, or their religion.

That disability-based bias crime is among the least likely to be reported has been repeatedly shown in the limited data available. In the United States, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights has observed that a or afraid of not being believed," or reliant upon caregivers to do so, who do not. In the latter case, caregivers themselves may be responsible for serious crimes. Even when crimes are reported, the disability dimension may not be investigated or recorded.[173] These observations are reflected in the low numbers reported in the FBI's annual crime reports. In 2005, the latest survey available, the FBI reported 53 disability-based offenses, with 54 victims nationwide. Of these, 21 victims were targeted because of physical disabilities and 33 for mental disabilities.[174] Just 0.7 percent of the total of 7,160 hate crime incidents were classified as disability-based in 2005.

While the annual crime reports are important as an acknowledgment that disability-based crime is a part of the larger crime picture in the United States, the system has been criticized for severely underestimating the scale of these offences. Critics have noted, for example, that even hate crimes that receive national attention may not be registered as such in the crime reports police jurisdictions submit to the FBI. Hate crimes expert Jack Glaser, of the University of California at Berkeley, cites analysis showing that "disability hate crimes are not just underreported, they are virtually unreported. The number of media stories outnumber the statistics."[175]

The crimes that dropped out of the statistics include what is generally considered the first disability-based hate crime to go to trial in the United States: the 1999 assault in Middletown, New Jersey on a man with cognitive disabilities who was "kidnapped, choked, beaten, burned with cigarettes, taped to a chair, his eyebrows shaved, and ultimately abandoned in a forest." The prosecutor opened the case by declaring that the accused had "tormented this mentally disabled man because of his disability"; seven of the accused were sentenced to long prison terms.[176] But the case did not appear in the Uniform Crime Reports as a hate crime.[177]

In the United Kingdom, prosecution of disability hate crimes is relatively new, as provisions of the Criminal Justice Act of 2003 for increasing sentences for crimes against disabled people where these are aggravated by bias became law only in April 2005. The act covers England and Wales. Similar provisions were enacted in Northern Ireland, in the Criminal Justice (No. 2) (Northern Ireland) Order of 2004, which came into force in September 2004 after extensive surveys of disability based crime. The Northern Ireland act establishes a statutory requirement for judges to treat racist, sectarian, sexual orientation, and disability bias as an aggravating fact in sentencing.[178]

Hate crime statistics published by the Police Services of Northern Ireland for the 2005/2006 monitoring year covered 38 incidents of disability-based hate crime, including 21 assaults and woundings.[179] The proportion of violent crime in disability-based offenses, 63.2 percent, was higher than in crimes classed as racist (45.7 percent of 746), faith/religion (57.7 percent of 78 crimes), or in crimes classed as sectarian (47 percent of 1,470 offences), and exceeded only in homophobic crimes (68.2 percent of 148 offences). There were 33 offences of wounding or assault, 4 of threat or conspiracy to murder, and 27 of criminal damage. Violent crimes are defined as crimes against the person, sexual offenses, and robbery.[180]

In Scotland a high incidence of hate crimes targeting the disabled was revealed in a survey by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) and Capability Scotland, the leading disability organization there. A Working Group on Hate Crime set up by the Scottish Executive recommended similar legislation, and a draft hate crimes statute was approved by the executive.[181] More than a year later, however, the act had yet to be submitted to the Scottish Assembly, and Scotland still lags behind other parts of the United Kingdom in protection against hate crimes.

In February 2007, the Crown Prosecution Service, which covers England and Wales, published a policy to explain how it will prosecute cases of disability hate crimes. In drawing up the policy, the CPS invited representatives of disability organizations to join a steering group, where they could offer their expertise and views, and also consulted with disabled people. In a statement, Director of Public Prosecutions Kenneth Macdonald stressed that the courts "can now pass a higher sentence when we prosecute a case as a disability hate crime," and that when disabled persons are victims of crimes aggravated by hostility towards their disability, "our prosecutors will work with the police to find evidence of this." [182]

The disabled themselves have been among the strongest advocates for action against hate crimes, including through such organizations as Scotland's Capability Scotland, and through media run by and for disabled people. The BBC's website "Ouch!" (Its stated aim is "to reflect the lives of disabled people right here and now in the third millennium.") includes first person accounts from those who have suffered such attacks, and how they cope. Liz Ball, who is deaf and blind and who works in London, recounts being assaulted upon leaving an underground station, her attackers stealing only her white and red cane and the notebook she uses to communicate,  and describes what it meant to her.[183]

Hate Crimes and Human Rights Defenders
 

Human rights defenders and others who speak out against hate crimes or support the rights of minority communities have often themselves been the victims of violent attacks.[184] In a number of countries, members of extremist organizations have targeted members of antiracist organizations for violence. Those who lead and take part in parades and events in support of equal rights for the LGBT community have also been subject to violent backlashes for their actions. Those under threat include young people targeted for intimidation, violence, and even murder because they speak out against racism and intolerance.

Some criminal justice systems, in what should be included in compilations of "best practices," have expressly recognized as hate crimes the targeting of individuals for their support of the rights of minorities, without themselves being members of these groups. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's guidelines on hate crimes data collection cover situations in which "The victim was engaged in activities" promoting equal rights. Examples given include: "[t]he victim was a member of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) or participated in gay rights demonstrations." The guidelines stress that a hate crime can be identified when the victims are not members of the targeted groups, but rather are members of "an advocacy group supporting the precepts of the victim group." [185]

Other hate crimes guidelines for law enforcement give explicit attention both to those targeted for their activism or others attacked for their close association with particular groups. British guidelines, for example, refer to hostility based on membership of a particular racial or religious group, while noting that "membership" includes "association with members of that group."[186]

The working definition of hate crimes adopted by the ODIHR usefully incorporates similar language:

Part A) Any criminal offence, including offences against persons or property, where the victim, premises or target of the offence are selected because of their real or perceived connection, attachment, affiliation, support or membership with a group as defined in part B.

Part B) A group may be based upon their real or perceived race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or other similar factor.[187]

In practice, human rights defenders, young and old, are frequently the object of intimidation and violence based on prejudice and hatred, whether or not they are members of minorities with which they are associated. Examples of such attacks include the June 19, 2004, murder in St. Petersburg, in the Russian Federation, of Nikolai Girenko, then perhaps the leading expert on extremism and racist incitement in Russia. Human rights defenders who monitor the discriminatory treatment of minorities in the context of ongoing hostilities, such as the Chechnya conflict, face both government action to restrict or punish their activities and the threat of private violence.

In many countries where immigrants and asylum seekers have been particular targets for racist violence, individuals and organizations that speak out against racism and anti-immigrant bias have themselves become targets for violence. In Cyprus, on March 31, 2007, extreme nationalists attacked the Nicosia headquarters of the nongovernmental organization Action for Equality, Support and Antiracism, better known for its acronym KISA. The walls and doors of the offices were spray-painted with swastikas and the nationalist slogan "Zito to ethnos" ("Long live the nation"). The incident followed an attack by some 30 young extreme nationalists, who are known for attacks on Turkish Cypriots, on an event that brought together members of Cyprus' ethnic Greek and ethnic Turkish populations.[188] KISA provides daily support and legal advice to immigrants and refugees and is the Cyprus affiliate of the European Network Against Racism (ENAR).

In June 2006, Amnesty International spoke out about a pattern of arson attacks against "persons and organizations which have spoken out against racism in Malta." The Jesuit community there, it said, had become a particular target for its work to denounce racism and defend the rights of "migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers," not least for its role as the anti-racist focal point for Malta of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC).[189] In one attack on March 13, just days after the publication of an EUMC report addressing racism in Malta, seven cars at the Jesuit Community Center were set alight. Also in March, arsonists attacked the home of a poet shortly after his launch of a new book promoting tolerance and the rights of refugees. In May 3, the front door of the editor of the Maltese weekly Malta Today was set alight, shortly after its publication of a major editorial denouncing racism; and on May 13, arsonists carried out a similar attack on the home of a journalist on the same paper who had written and spoken on racism and immigration.[190]

In Poland, on May 16, 2006, an anti-racist activist was stabbed and nearly killed near his home in Warsaw. The Anti-Defamation League reported on this attack, which "was widely regarded as connected with the neo-Nazi Web site ‘Redwatch,' operated by the Polish branch of the Blood and Honor network, which had published the activist's name on it list of ‘enemies.'"[191]

In Germany, a subset of the incidents registered by federal authorities as extremist political violence are categorized as right-wing violence targeting left-wing political activists: although some of these cases also fall within a category of hate crimes motivated by anti-racist action or by association with minorities and minority issues, official monitoring is not known to make this distinction.[192]

Similarly, in our recent report on hate crimes in the Russian Federation, Minorities Under Siege, we noted that young people who speak out against racist violence through music and groups that call themselves anti-Fascist are increasingly themselves the victims.[193] The murder of 20-year-old student, musician, and anti-racist activist Timur Kacharava in St. Petersburg, on November 13, 2005, is a recent example of the targeting of activists who fight discrimination outside of the framework of traditional human rights organizations.

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