On Friday, July 5, 2024, a meeting of the Working Group for Monitoring Hate Crimes was held at the Office for Human Rights and the Rights of National Minorities of the Government of the Republic of Croatia, one of the partners in the project ” Improved Response to Hate Speech through Legal Research, Advocacy and Training – REASON”. The meeting was convened by the Head of the Office, Mr. Alen Tahiri, to present the results of the empirical research on misdemeanour and criminal cases of hate speech and evidence-based recommendations for improving the practices of authorities responsible for the criminal response to punishable manifestations of intolerance.
The results were presented by the project’s legal experts, Professors Maja Munivrana and Aleksandar Maršavelski from the Department of Criminal Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, and the Project Manager, Ivana Eterović from the Croatian Law Centre.
This meeting was the first in a series of seven planned advocacy meetings where key stakeholders will discuss the results and recommendations and advocate for their adoption to improve the response to the most severe, punishable manifestations of intolerance.