Czech Republic: Romani people most frequently targeted for hate violence

Hate violence is defined as violence committed by an assailant against a victim because of the assailant’s bias against the victim’s presumed membership in a nationality, political group, religion, sexual orientation, skin color, subculture, or other marker of social status. In the Czech Republic, Romani people are the most frequent victims of hate crimes, followed by ethnic Czechs, foreigners, Jewish people and Muslims. Other groups targeted here include anti-racist activists, the disabled, and gays and lesbians.

The forms of this violence vary. Less serious forms include graffiti or verbal assault, while the more serious ones may rise to the level of felonies: Arson or terrorist attacks, persecution, physical assault, rape, threats, and violent demonstrations. According to police statistics, around 300 such cases occur in the Czech Republic per year. However, these statistics represent just a fraction of the incidents that actually occur – roughly 10 % of all of the cases that take place in this country. The incidents unaccounted for either involved no direct victim, were never reported to police, or took place without police correctly identifying their bias motivation.

There are many reasons why people do not report such incidents. The most frequent reasons are the fact that victims may prefer to forget the entire incident, their fear of revenge, their previous bad experiences with the criminal justice system, their unfamiliarity with the legal system, and their efforts to settle less serious incidents out of court. Hate crime is punished through the imposition of longer sentencing should it be proved that a perpetrator committed either a general felony (arson, assault) motivated by some of the biases recognized by law, or that the criminal actions in and of themselves constituted bias hatred. The state also criminalizes behavior which endangers social cohesion in a significant way along the lines of ethnicity, gender, religion, and political or subculture groupings.

The question is often asked whether the most predominant hate incidents committed are verbal assaults. The statistical composition of hate crimes shows that police most often investigate incidents which do not involve physical assault, but active work on behalf of a hate movement, graffiti, and verbal assaults. In 2011 the police solved only 21 cases of hate-motivated grievous bodily harm compared to 96 cases of the crime of support and promotion of a movement aimed at suppressing human rights and freedoms.

There are two possible explanations for this. Either the real number of hate crimes involving physical assault in the Czech Republic is significantly lower than in Western Europe and the USA, or the Czech police have greater difficulty in solving such cases than their counterparts elsewhere. The key question which must be clarified when solving hate crimes is the perpetrator’s bias motivation. It is more difficult to prove this motivation with respect to physical assault than it is to prove it for verbal assaults committed through graffiti, speeches, and websites. Czech Police President Lessy has also warned of the ongoing abuse of the so-called “tab system” for evaluating police officers’ job performances, whereby officers who solve a greater number of crimes are considered the most successful. Understandably, criminal acts which are more difficult to investigate, such as physical assaults motivated by hate, take a longer time and more effort to solve, which means officers working on them will not be able to close as many cases as other officers do.

It is generally assumed that the perpetrators of hate crimes are almost exclusively neo-Nazis or promoters of similar hate groups. However, this is not true. Academic and scientific research shows that only 10 – 20 % of hate crime perpetrators are also hate group activists.

What does this mean? Primarily, it means the real threat of hate crime is posed by members of the general population, and that therefore the police’s preventive and repressive activities should be focused on them. The vast majority of hate crimes are perpetrated by men (of the 320 people who committed hate crimes last year, only 14 were women). The average age of the perpetrators is 25. In this context, we must warn against the courts taking a perpetrator’s youth into account when setting sentencing and underestimating the dangerousness of his or her behavior. Police psychologist Ludmila Čírtková does not consider it appropriate for the behavior of such perpetrators to be excused by the assumption that they will “grow out of it”, or that they acted out of youthful indiscretion. Last year 28 % of all hate crime perpetrators were recidivists, as were more than half of the perpetrators of hate violence.

With the help of NGOs, a new law in the Czech Republic will ensure a better position for hate crime victims. The state’s approach to hate violence is improving little by little, primarily thanks to the influence and activities of NGOs and international organizations. Bias motivation has been part of Czech criminal law for more than 50 years, but not all groups of persons threatened by hate violence are protected. Attacks motivated by ethnic, national, political, racist or religious hatred are criminalized more harshly. People living with disabilities and people attacked because of their age or their sexual orientation are not as well protected.

Hate crime has been designated a serious phenomenon through an order issued by the Police President to certain police psychologists. Hate crime victims are to be approached with increased sensitivity and the psychologists’ presence is directly indicated in some cases. A shift toward improving the position of hate crime victims has also been designed by the new law on crime victims, which defines the victims of physical violent hate assaults as “particularly vulnerable victims” and, like the victims of sexual crimes, makes it possible for them to receive special treatment on the basis of their particularly traumatizing victimization. In future, this law should entitle hate crime victims to compensation, free legal aid, and a whole other catalog of rights.

The In IUSTITIA civic association has been providing aid to the victims of hate violence in the Czech Republic for three years. Thanks to its cooperation with news server ROMEA.cz, people who have been subjected to hate attacks can seek help by calling a free hotline. In 2011 In IUSTITIA assisted 35 hate crime victims.