The purpose of this paper is to expose the problems with the current state of play in which the law and the justice institutions are no longer responding to hate speech, as in practice hate speach itself is no longer considered as a crime. Criminal prosecution of hate speech has become extremely rare, in spite of the fact that hate speech is expansion, escalation and intensification, while in the recent years it has almost completely vanished. The paper analyses the reasons for this, which is followed by a discussion whether law and the justice system still have a role to play in addressing this problem, or have they completely renounced it. The attempts to replace the lack of legal and justice responses has been taken over by the civil society initiatives which developed various methods to respond to hate speech. The question is, however, whether they can effectively replace criminal justice. The paper concludes with recommendations for the legislature, the judiciary and civil society, but also with a specific recommendations for the Prosecutor's Office which currently represents the main obstacle for criminal prosecution of hate speech.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1240429
The chapter discusses anti-immigrant hate speech in Slovenia in the latter third of the year 2015. Firstly, it discusses the rising online racist anti-immigration and anti-Muslim attitudes with the help of sociology of nationalism. Secondly, it positions this particular case in the wider European context of how the “refugee crisis” has been represented in social media and how the political elite reacted (if at all) to these developments. Finally, it sets out to review the most relevant developments subsumed under the debate on online hate speech in Slovenia. In so doing, it treats the phenomenon of online hate speech as a direct reflection of the wider collapse of EU migration, integration and asylum policies. This chapter therefore argues that it is necessary to address the production of racist policies and the discriminatory treatment of refugees and migrants by analyzing the rhetoric of political actors as key instigators of hate speech.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1246573