Livre wants to force authorities to report if a crime is motivated by hate

Livre wants to force authorities to reveal whether a crime is motivated by hatred or not after receiving a complaint, warning of a rise in intolerance in society.

After meeting with leaders of the Portuguese Association for the Support of Victims (APAV), Livre’s sole deputy, Rui Tavares, defended the authorities’ “obligation, when they receive a report of a crime, to report whether it is a hate crime or not.”

“An obligation that is in the law of other countries, which is not in Portugal and which may be relevant at an early stage of a given process, so that later, when this process is investigated and a verdict is reached, if the crime was a hate crime, that the victim can adequately protected and the offender has the boundaries that the law requires when the crime is a hate crime,” he said.

The head of the Livra list in the Lisbon Circle said that he senses “a resurgence of hate speech, intolerance and an increase in permissiveness towards aggressiveness in speech, which is reflected in people” and has “real-life consequences that are very harmful and negative for specific people, especially minorities and women.”

A few minutes earlier, Frederico Marques, APAV’s operations coordinator, told reporters that the association was receiving more and more complaints through the Safe Internet line.

“Last year I would highlight the number of victims of hate crimes and hate speech who came to us, which rose to 167,” he stressed.

Frederico Márquez expressed concern about this reality and stated that cases reaching the APAV, as well as the official justice system, “are just the tip of the iceberg.”

“We have a problem with the recording of such situations by the authorities, where this record is often not kept,” he noted.

Another of the proposals left to Livre after the meeting to combat or prevent violent phenomena is the creation of “shared spaces for families who share responsibility for the custody of their minor children.”

“In other words, there are places for childbirth, for joint visits, which are often moments of tension in families in critical situations, and that municipal councils or the state itself can provide places that are pleasant for children, which do not “I don’t have that institutional weight space,” he suggested.

Livre defends the creation of a reserve of interpreters and translators for cases of violence, pointing out that people who cannot report violence in Portuguese “are in a kind of double isolation”, as well as a national survey “on issues of victimization, especially in cases of cyber violence” . and cyberstalking.”

APAV defines hate crimes as crimes whose purpose is “to convey a message of hatred and intolerance to both the victim and the group of which he is a part,” and which may be motivated by “racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance.” , homophobia, transphobia, prejudice against people with disabilities, among other characteristics.”