Justice Minister Helen McEntee will publish new legislation today to tackle hate crimes and hate speech.
The Incitement to Violence or Hate Crimes Bill is designed to facilitate the prosecution of these crimes and includes a demonstrative test as well as a motivation test described in a previous bill.
The bill adds gender, including gender identity and expression, and disability to a list of protected characteristics that includes race, color, national origin, religion, and sexual orientation.
Ireland does not currently have specific legislation to tackle hate crime, but the bill is expected to be enacted by the end of the year.
It will also create aggravated forms of some existing crimes, such as assault and criminal mischief, when such crimes are motivated by hate.
They will carry a more severe penalty and a person’s criminal history will clearly indicate that the crime was a hate crime.
Provisions of the new legislation have been developed to ensure that they capture hate speech in an online context, including social media for example.
Minister McEntee said that hate speech is an abuse that sees vulnerable and minority communities as the main target.
“We have worked hard to strike a balance in this Bill in protecting the right to free speech with protection of vulnerable and minority communities from dangerous hate speech. Although it is a small minority of individuals carrying out these reprehensible acts and spouting this abuse, there is a clear desire from the public that these individuals need to be dealt with in the appropriate way. All provisions throughout the Bill have been carefully developed to ensure it is victim-centred and effective in securing convictions where serious crimes are committed”, she said, reported RTE.
The new offenses will allow the ‘hate criminal’ label to follow a criminal through the courts, under Garda control etc, and the data collected will provide a more complete picture of the prevalence of different types of hate incidents in Ireland.
University of Limerick Associate Professor of Sociology Dr Amanda Haynes said the minister’s announcement sees a change in the language used for hate speech and that it was welcomed.
Speaking to RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, she said there has been a long wait for the legislation.
“We need a legislative framework for dealing with hate crimes. We’re already dealing with them through the courts, but without a legislative framework we don’t have clarity or consistency for victims, for offenders or for criminal justice professionals,” she said, reports RTE.
She added that hate crime depends on legal construction and motivation has a high threshold of proof, but with the new aspect of proof of evidence, it will allow us to examine what led to the crime.
According to RTE, she added: “Previously we heard language around proportionality and clarity, and now we have moved to language around ease of prosecutions. But ease of prosecutions isn’t really a principle that we apply in determining generally how to formulate the law and it’s going to create a very broad net. If our only measure of effectiveness is how many convictions we secured, then perhaps this is the appropriate way forward. But I think we also have to think about the principle of minimal criminalisation and the principle of fair labeling. Are those two groups of people really equivalent? Both of them undoubtedly cause harm with their expression of homophobic pressure. But it is the nature of the harm that they have caused really equivalent? Do we want to address both in the same way under the law, and do we want to have no capability to distinguish between those two groups of people? Those who demonstrated prejudice and those who were motivated to commit an offence out of prejudice.”
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