According to ActiveWatchs report, a human rights organization, advocating for free communication in the public interest, Hungarians and sexual minorities were the main targets of hate speech last year in Romania. The report, entitled “Annual report on the intolerant and hate speech in Romania – 2018”, was released on June 13 and its aim is to review the main hate speech and anti-hate trends in Romania.
The organization collected the main problematic topics of public discourse, not just those that may result in penalties, but also those that encourage intolerance against minorities (ethnic, sexual, religious, minorities etc.). The research focused on several topics: manifestations of intolerance in public spaces, manifestation in public spaces supporting diversity, the activity of the main institutions with jursidiction to sanction hate speech, self-regulation of political parties, media organizations, advertising industry, sport federations, and national legislation or legislative proposals.
According to their results, Hungarians and sexual minorities were the main targets of hate speech last year in Romania, but the violent hate speech tends to appear at local and not at national level. Other relevant result of the report shows that in several cases, politicians used offensive expressions, without even realizing it, while the anti-Semitism is still really present, but the Islamophobic and anti-migrant discourse has diminished.
On the other hand, manifestations supporting diversity reach to more and more people, attracting more people than manifestations that promote intolerance. Last year a lot of public figures showed their support for the LGBTQ community when there was a referendum about changing the definition of the family in the Constitution.
Out of all the institutions with the competence to sanction hate speech the Romanian National Anti-Discrimination Council (CNCD) was the one that settled most complaints last year. It managed to shorten the time to settle a complaint and the total amount of fines significantly increased. The National Audiovisual Council (CNA) applied a small number of sanctions in 2018, but with a much higher value than those applied by CNCD. On the other hand, the CNA was basically absent during the referendum, and due to its decisions taken on the referendums media representation, it clearly favored those who wanted the referendum to be validated.
The report also underlines that the self-regulation of political parties, media organizations seems to be more on paper, and the anti-hate discourse inside the political parties does not reach the media. The organization underlines that sport federations also need to improve the way they handle hate speech during games.
(Title image: Anti-Hungarian banner)
