Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law

The term ‘hate crime’ refers to criminal offenses committed against individuals, primarily because of their group affiliation, which are motivated by hate or disdain for the nationality, ethnic origin, sexual orientation or other similar characteristics of the victim.

The term was first coined in the United States in the 1980s. Hate crime describes a criminal phenomenon that is of significance for societies all around the world, as it encompasses the unlawful intimidation or physical persecution of a wide array of different target groups (Jenness/Broad, 1997). In the case of hate crime, the victim is interchangeable: the crime is intended to intimidate not only one particular individual but also to send a message that imposes a subordinate and inferior status on the entire community that shares the same attributes as the individual victim.

The notion of hate crime was first explicitly introduced into German criminal policy in January 2001, when the Federal Ministry of the Interior referred to the concept in its reform of the police registration system. According to the Bundeskriminalamt (2004), hate crimes are ‘politically motivated offenses’ that occur if ‘…in the assessment of the circumstances of the crime and/or attitude of the perpetrator, there is reason to suspect that the act was directed against a person because of his or her nationality, ‘race’, origin, ethnicity, skin color, physical appearance, sexual orientation, disability, religion or social status and the offense is thus in a causal relationship to this.’ The use of comprehensive definition criteria, as well as the unanimously agreed upon and standardized procedures, has meant that nationwide standards are now in place to register the occurrence of hate crimes.

The aim of Alke Glet’s study ‘The Social Construction and Prosecution of Hate Crime in Germany. An Empirical Study on Policing and Prosecuting Hate-Motivated Offenses’ was to explore the characteristics of registered hate crime in Germany, to determine the core elements of these crimes, and to discuss the difficulties that police and prosecution services face when trying to establish a ‘hate’ motive.

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