STAND-UP Newsletter No. 5 was released in January 2024. It was the last newsletter of the project and it gathered information about all partners’ activities from September 2023 and January 2024, including the final event in Brussels that marked the end of the two-year project.
You can read it on the following link: STAND-UP Newsletter #5
The Euro-Arab Foundation has become a member of the REDOI Network (Spanish Network against Hate Crimes and under-reporting), a national network of experts involved in the fight against hate phenomena, coordinated by ‘Está en tu mano’, a funded project by the European Commission’s Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund and the Spanish Directorate General for Humanitarian Attention and Social Inclusion of Immigration.
This network aims to prevent hate crimes and hate speech through a multi-agency cooperation approach, creating synergies, data sharing, and possible research collaborations at a national and European level.
Researcher Lucía García del Moral Martín is to represent the Foundation in the Third Sector Correspondent in Granada [Corresponsalía del Tercer Sector en Granada].
Access to REDOI’s website
As a part of the STAND-UP Project, an EU Policy Paper on EU-level recommendations on supporting multi-agency cooperation in countering hate crime, considering that integration of technological tools has emerged as a pivotal aspect of the collective response, was delivered.
The policy recommendations proposed under the project adopt a multi-stakeholder approach, emphasizing the importance of collaboration among public and private parties, including law enforcement agencies, criminal justice, other national institutions, such as National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), policymakers, and the broader community.
In the digital age, technology plays a dual role in the perpetuation and prevention of hate crime
This paper incorporates the extensive work accomplished over the past two years through the STAND-UP Project; it overviews how to enhance multi-agency cooperation at the national and EU level through the participation of a wide variety of stakeholders, moving beyond the EU High-Level Group proposed “structured” cooperation between LEAs and CSOs
In this way, a future strategic document by the European Union is anticipated to outline a comprehensive approach specifically targeting the issue of hate crime and hate phenomena, both in the physical world and online. This prospective document, in response to the evolving and increasing challenges of hate-based incidents, is expected to detail forward-looking steps which will aim to ensure robust monitoring, establish fair and efficient legal procedures, and develop a sustainable system capable of responding to emerging trends in hate crime and online hate speech and of tackling discrimination and human rights violations.
After a two-year multi-agency work bringing discrimination, intolerance, and hatred into focus, the European project STAND-UP has come to an end. The closure event, the seminar Stand Together Against Hate: A Multi-Agency Initiative was held in Brussels, on the 11th of January, with an introductive part of the project conducted by Giovanni Gasparani, Prosecutor office of Venice, and the keynote speech of Magdalena Adamowicz, member of the European Parliament for the European People’s Party whose husband, the Polish politician Paweł Adamowicz, was assassinated by an extremist in which is considered a hate crime.
The morning session included the roundtable Navigating the Intersection of Hate Speech and Crimes with Menno Ettema, Programme Manager and Co-Secretary to expert Committee on Combating Hate Speech, to expert Committee on Combating Hate Speech; Nataša Vučković (via online), member of the Center for Democracy Foundation (CDF); Sergio Bianchi (online), expert of the Group on Combating Anti-Muslim hatred and discrimination in the EU; and finally Simonetta Moro (online) from the Municipality of Bologna.
One of the main outputs of STAND-UP project, the EU Policy Paper: ‘EU-Level Policy Recommendations on Supporting Multi-Agency Cooperation in Countering Hate Crime, Including Through the Use of Technologies‘ elaborated by GNCHR, was presented during the morning session by GNCHR representatives Eva Tzavala, Coordinator of the Scientific Unit, and Dr. Anastasia Chalkia, Human Rights Officer.
The six European project partners shared the afternoon session’s panels on interagency cooperation to tackle hate crimes and hate speech, as well as local pilot success stories and results developed in Veneto, Athens, Andalusia, and Trentino-Alto Adige. The first included the participation of Akis Karatrandos, Research Fellow at ELIAMEP and Senior Advisor at KEMEA; Katerina Charokopou, Legal Officer at GNCHR; Viviana Gullo, Project Manager of Agenfor; FUNDEA’s Research Fellow, Lucía García del Moral, and of Prof. Artinopoulou (EPLO) as a moderator. On its side, the second panel entailed the interventions of Clara Raffaele Addamo, lawyer, Prosecutor office of Trento; Viviana Gullo, Agenfor’s Project Manager; Katerina Charokopou, Legal Officer of GNCHR; Giovanni Gasparini, Prosecutor Office of Venice; Prof. Artinopoulou, Director of the Institute on Crime & Criminal Justice (EPLO); Maryna Manchenko, from CESIE; and Viviana Gullo, Agenfor’s Project Manager, as a moderator.
Implementing the STAND-UP multi-agency model to stop hate crimes
During its implementation period, between January 2022 and January 2024, the STAND-UP project held several activities, among them an exclusive webinar addressing hate crime in the digital era or regional courses in Italy and Greece to improve competence and technological skills to combat hate phenomena, using technologies such as Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) to monitor hate speech, along with Virtual Reality simulations and the STAND-UP model based on a victim-centered approach. The courses were focused on multi-agency cooperation, hate phenomena, and national and European legislation, and were addressed to members of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), Public Authorities (judiciaries, ministries, prosecutors), or associations or communities affected by hate crime or hate speech.
An anonymous form to denounce hate crimes was created and a six-month pilot was run with the implementation of OSINT-monitoring centers that generate alerts and reports when online traffic concerning hateful sentiment toward a given at-risk group surpasses average levels, based on the semantic bank for hateful sentiment and identified at-risk groups. The pilot compared levels of hateful content online with incidents of hate crime to understand the extent to which the two are reflective of each other and, thus, explore how rising tensions or growing hateful sentiment towards a given group can be the trigger for preventive action. This pilot also implemented the Blueprint for Cooperation, using a platform to share information and a model of granular access and trialing the model memoria of understanding, as well as the Victim Support Handbook for effective but sensitive investigations and prosecutions.
A Victim Support Handbook
To boost the victim-centered approach, something crucial to make victims feel safe, to openly speak of their experience and to seek help and advice, the STAND-UP project made public its Victim Support Handbook (download here) that exposes the terminology and a synthesis of the STAND-UP project and the technology tool OSIN used. It provides context on hate-crime victims’ rights within the EU, defining who are hate crime victims, types of hate speeches and crimes and their impact, as well as a victim-centered approach to support; it establishes the role of CSOs and prosecutors, the legal framework and good practices in Italy, Greece, and Spain, and it concludes with a toolkit for analyzing a particular case of hate speech.
The Handbook is a significant tool that aims at the sustainability of support service providers like the CSOs (Civil Society Organizations), the most relevant actors in the victim support systems, and that puts on the table the importance of partnerships with the public sector, able to establish national funds.
Brussels, 11 January 2024.- The closure event of the European STAND-UP project, the seminar “Stand Together Against Hate: A Multi-Agency Initiative”, has taken place this Thursday in the Residence Palace, Brussels, with the intervention of experts on hate speech crime, and the handout of the Victim Support Handbook as an efficient tool to hate monitoring and reporting. The morning session also included the presentation of the EU policy recommendations on supporting multi-agency cooperation in countering hate crime, making a special mention of the use of technologies for this purpose.
The seminar presented the results of various training programmes in different countries included in the project, creating an environment for in-depth discussions and exchanges. Experts such as Menno Ettema, Magdalena Adamowicz, Nataša Vučković, Akis Karatrandos will spoke on the topic of hate speech crime.
The six European project’s partners – National Commission for Human Rights (Greece), Euro-Arab Foundation (Spain), European Public Law Organization (Greece), Agenfor International Foundation (Italy), and European Association for Local Democracy (France), under the coordination of the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Ordinary Court of Trento (Italy) – have shared the afternoon session’s panels on interagency cooperation to tackle hate crimes and hate speech, as well as local pilot success stories and results developed in Veneto, Athens, Andalusia and Trentino-Alto Adige.
The STAND-UP project, co-funded with 748,780.66 euros by the European Commission Directorate General for Justice and Consumers, has taken place from January 2022 and January 2024 and it has focused on public authorities and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs)’ responsibilities and relationships with victims. It has enhanced multi-agency cooperation by establishing harmonized definitions of hate crime, embedded within a blueprint framework for cooperation, and it standardizes reporting procedures through the co-design and validation of reporting forms for law enforcement agencies, and CSOs/NGOs. STAND-UP has deepened the relevant actors’ point of view of hate speech and hate crime, including the sentiments behind them on a local level.
On Tuesday, December 12, 2023, the GNCHR actively participated in an international online seminar titled ‘Addressing Hate Crimes in the Digital Age’. During this event, the GNCHR, as a key partner in the STAND UP program, presented and deliberated upon their European policy proposals. The GNCHR’s President, Professor Maria Gavouneli, presented the most effective national practices for hate crime, along with the related initiatives spearheaded by the GNCHR. Following this, GNCHR’s Scientific Department Coordinator, Eva Tzavala, and Human Rights Officer, Dr. Anastasia Chalkia, introduced the EU-Level Policy Paper.
This document encapsulates the STAND UP program’s strategic recommendations to the European Union for addressing hate crimes. It emphasizes the importance of wide-ranging cooperation among all involved stakeholders and the innovative use of technology. Authored by GNCHR scientific collaborators E. Tzavala, A. Chalkia, and K. Charokopou, the policy paper is readily available in English.
Photos and information in Greek:
The Online Focus Group was held towards the end of the pilot phase on 23 November 2023 in order to have a recap of the efforts from all the participants involved, receive feedback on the use of the OSINT software (Tangles), the challenges faced and insights on the outcomes from the analytical and monitoring work.
The Euro-Arab Foundation participated in the International Congress Expressions of Hate, Digital Media and Detection Processes (CIOMD) which was held from 19 to 20 October at the Faculty of Information Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid, organised by the projects Catografiocom and HateMedia. The participation of the Euro-Arab Foundation was focused on the papers: Monitoring right-wing extremist Narratives: Case Studies 20 and 25 November, Alternative Voices to Misogynist Frames: Countering Manosphere Narratives, and New Discursive Frames as Prevention of Extremism, all within the European STAND-UP framework, by FUNDEA’s researchers, Javier Ruipérez Canales, Lucía García del Moral, José Luis Salido Medina and Daniel Pérez Garcia.
The Catografiocom and HateMedia projects, funded by the State Research Agency – Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain, are led by more than 30 researchers from several universities in Spain from different areas of knowledge, who have been working, interdisciplinarily, in the study of the central theme of this conference, hate crimes.
Cartografiocom Project- Cartography of hate speech in Spain through communication: sports, bullfighting and politics’ focuses its research on detecting and analyzing through communication, hate speech in Spain: How and where it manifests itself, what patterns of dissemination it follows, what language and rhetorical resources it uses, what tradition or novelty it presents in our country, what environments favor it, and other aspects already mentioned.
Hate Media Project – Taxonomy, presence, and intensity of hate speech in digital environments linked to the Spanish professional media’, focuses its objectives on analyzing how hate speech is disseminated in digital environments associated with the professional media; and encouraging the detection and monitoring of this type of speech in Spain.
On Friday 20th October 2023, Agenfor International Foundation presented, with the support of the Municipality of Turin, the jointwork of the European projects TRUST and STAND-UP at CTE NEXT, House of EmergingTechnologies, a dissemination event on hate phenomena and the public-private cooperation model.Among the speakers, the Councillor Giovanna Pentenero, Municipality Councillor AbdullahiAhmed, and RAN expert Diletta Berardinelli.
The conference was well attended, in presence as well as online, by Muslim communities inparticular, women, who are still the most affected group in Italy, but also by representatives of civilsociety associations and organisations.
The event opened with the presentation of Viviana Gullo (Junior Project Manager at AgenforInternational) on the European projects TRUST and STAND-UP, which focus is on theimplementation of a model to counter and prevent hate phenomena, based on public-private cooperation, starting from the analysis of phenomena in the online reality.
The speaker and moderator briefly presented the essentials for understanding hate crime and hatespeech, starting with the definitions of under-reporting and under-recording. It is important to startwith these definitions because discrimination, intolerance and hatred towards individuals orcommunities on the grounds of gender, ethnicity, religion, or other aspects of a person’s identity arestill widespread in our society. The limited or lack of reporting and recording of hate phenomenafoments their recurrence, “normalising hatred”. According to interviews conducted during the firstmonths of TRUST, Ms. Gullo continues, it is precisely the tolerance of Muslim women who haveexperienced discrimination, crimes and hate speech that is emphasised, i.e. the reality of consideringthe reporting or denouncing of such violations useless, which prevents the phenomena from beingcombated.
Agenfor International compiled several hate crime witnesses and victims, including those people who have been insulted or have suffered any physical or verbal aggression, destruction or damage of property, or cyber-attacks, because of their gender identity, disability, religion, sex, or other innate characteristics, through a scannable QR questionnaire.
The motto “Together we can fight and prevent the hatred” encouraged victims and witnesses to collaborate with their experiences to collect data and reports to submit to the European Commission to draft policy proposals and recommendations at the national and European levels, establishing a public authority-led investigative-preventive law enforcement model.