No place for hate: a Europe united against hatred

Key points

The EESC:

• welcomes the Communication while stressing the need for a more comprehensive partnership with CSOs. It calls for awareness-raising campaigns and efforts to combat the ‘ecosystems’ of hatred off- and online and recalls the responsibility of politicians to avoid language promoting hated;

• calls on the EU to adopt a comprehensive approach and fight hate based on any protected human characteristics, to implement effectively existing strategies and initiatives promoting equality and non-discrimination, and to primarily use the same approach to fighting all types of hate. It calls on the Member States to prosecute hate-based crimes, encourage reporting, and train law enforcement agencies to handle such cases properly, with due respect for the victims;

• regrets that the anti-hate drive on online platforms is underdeveloped in scale and impact. The role and expertise of the flaggers should be expanded to consistently cover all types of online hate biases. Media and digital literacy should be improved to ensure more effective reporting;

• believes that the work of the High-Level Group on combating hate speech and hate crime should be better operationalised, training and capacity-building for civil society be enhanced, and reporting be made more effective. Reporting and benchmarking should be used to identify progress. Reporting of hate crimes should be standardised and institutionalised at EU level. Reporting mechanisms must be available and accessible, the Commission is encouraged to create an online platform for swift reporting by CSOs and human rights defenders of incidents;

• underlines that the Commission should organise a review of the work of CSOs, as well as trusted flaggers, and propose measures to increase their effectiveness and that work is scaled to the current challenges. The EU should insist that large online platforms prevent their algorithms from amplifying hate, and should use funds from the CERV programme and Horizon Europe to identify and combat ecosystems of hatred online, allowing existing educational and research capacities to contribute to this objective, and Erasmus+ citizenship education could also contribute to towards this aim.