Hate crimes

 
Hate crimes

Hate crimes. Cartoon of 12 September 2021 in CTXT

The Interior Ministry will create hate crime groups within the information units of the National Police and the Civil Guard.

This is one of the measures approved by the Commission for Monitoring the Action Plan to Combat Hate Crimes.

According to the Interior Ministry The new plan will establish eight priority lines of action and introduce new complementary measures to the first plan approved in March 2019, in force until 2021, which provided the State security forces with tools to deal with hate crimes and incidents, with a constant growth of around 9 per cent per year since 2014".

Every time we talk about hate crimes, we return to the same circular debates and the same discussions, many of which are mired in ambiguity due to their legal definition.

It cannot be denied that if there is one thing we are well served by, it is hate. Rather, of hatred, because the range of variants and of expressing and propagating them is extensive

Hate crimes

What is really complicated is to delimit these supposed crimes in order to establish which ones are and which ones are not when one enters the infinite world of the interpretation of laws. I pity the legal professionals (some of them) who have to take on the task of defining these offences.

This week, many media outlets have focused on this hate crime issue with a lot of emphasis on "the networks" and contributing to the feeling that any nonsense that an isolated misguided person or a joke of the blackest humour on Tuiter is on a par with the activity of the large organised groups of professional haters.

I fear that in the end it will end up being almost equally punishable to punish bad desires, twisted or cruel feelings and annoying but legitimate opinions, rather than the crimes themselves. What is supposed to be proven is that those shitty messages, beyond the injuries to the sentimentsThe only thing that is supposed to be proven is that these shitty messages, beyond the injuries to the victims, have caused the crime itself or were created with the sole intention of inciting them to be committed.

A textbook example that usually falls into this category, apart from the unbeatable classic fed by Nazi propaganda, is that of the rwanda genocide of 1994 as a perfect example of how the systematic dehumanisation of a group can lead to a massacre, even convincing many that it was inevitable and necessary.

But for this to happen there must be powerful accomplices who, without being guilty, contribute to letting it happen by looking the other way to avoid any intervention

This is basically what the international community did in the case of Rwanda, going so far as to refuse to pronounce the word "genocide" in order to skip over it the obligation to intervene after the French staged a propaganda parade by sending a photo with the Tutsis who had survived the massacre and claiming that they had everything under control, that everything was fine in Rwanda.

I think it's great and necessary that we know how to interpret the signals that the propagators of hatred plant without losing sight of the fact that lowering the bar too low can lead us to another scenario, also dangerous, that ends up limiting the exercise of our rights. There you have the infamous gagging lawwhich was written under the promise of "citizen security" and can still be applied for the opposite.


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