In the period December 28 – 30, 2012, workshop ”Hate Crimes and Hate Speech: A Strategy for Monitoring, Advocating, and a Process of a Court Proceeding ” was held at the Termag Hotel in Jahorina. The workshop was organized by the international human rights organization Civil Rights Defenders and the OSCE in BiH.

The aim of the training is to build the capacity of local non-governmental organizations dealing with the protection and promotion of human rights, so that they can more easily and consistently combat hate crimes and hate speech.

During the training, the NGOs recognized the need to establish a coalition that would systematically monitor and report to the public on hate speech and hate crimes in order to ensure prosecution of these criminal acts.

The workshop was attended by the Civil Rights Defenders’ partners from BiH, and the speakers were representatives of International and Domestic NGOs (ODIHR, OSCE BiH, MANEO, In IUSTITIA, INTERIGHTS, ARTICLE 19, RAK, Internews), and a judge of the Basic Court in Srebrenica who presented the work of their organizations on the following topics: Hate crimes and incident review, litigation, European Court of Human Rights, etc.

The workshop agenda can be downloaded here: Workshop-on-Hate-Crimes-and-Hate-Speech_draft-agenda-1