Study to support the preparation of the European Commission’s initiative to extend the list of EU crimes in Article 83 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU to hate speech and hate crime: Executive Summary

This document supports the Commission’s initiative to extend the list of EU crimes in Article 83 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU to hate speech and hate crime. It has been commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers and carried out by Spark Legal Network, in cooperation with Tipik. The objective of the Study is twofold: (i) to produce a detailed mapping of the national legal frameworks in all EU Member States to tackle hate speech and hate crime and (ii) to assess whether hate speech and hate crime meet the criteria of Article 83(1) TFEU. To achieve this objective, the Study relied on data collected through national desk research, public and targeted consultations, and literature review. This document presents the current criminalisation of hate speech and hate crime in the EU Member States. Furthermore, it includes a vast amount of data on the scale, nature, impact, seriousness and cross-border dimension of hate speech and hate crime, the developments in this area of crime, and assesses whether the Article 83(1) TFEU criteria are fulfilled by those type of criminal conducts.