Pakistan yet to legislate on the menace of hate crime

[ajtr]

Pakistan yet to legislate on the menace of hate crime

LAHORE: Following innumerable hate crime incidents against religious minorities in Pakistan during the past decades, the most recent being the one in which a Christian girl Rimsha Masih was allegedly framed in a fake blasphemy case by a prayer leader in Islamabad, time is perhaps ripe for this Islamic Republic to frame solid legislation in this context as longer jail terms and heavier monetary fines for those promoting religious hatred can perhaps deliver the goods to some extent.

One wonders that if the Pakistani parliamentarians have ever thought of legislating on hate crime or are they waiting for some more Rimsha Masih-like incidents to take place and tarnish the country’s image internationally? It looks weird to educate the Pakistani lawmakers, but this correspondent dares to inform them that even if the existing Pakistan Penal Code is fully implemented, it could serve the purpose to punish those who incite violence against religious minorities with a malicious intent every now and then.

A study of Pakistan Penal Code 1860 tells that while Article 153-A prescribes punishments for promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will between different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes, Part XV of the Penal Code also focuses on offences related to religion. Similarly, Article 295 criminalises the destruction, damaging or defiling any place of worship or “any object held sacred by any class of persons with the intention of thereby insulting the religion of any class of persons or with the knowledge that any class of persons is likely to consider such destruction damage or defilement as an insult to their religion.”

Article 298 also provides for punishing uttering of words or making of gestures “with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings of any person.” Farahnaz Ispahani, a suspended member of the National Assembly and media adviser to the PPP Co-Chairman President Asif Ali Zardari, had also mentioned these provisions already present in the Pakistan Penal Code of 1860 in one of her newspaper articles on August 16, 2012. Farahnaz had viewed: “Several countries have dealt with hate by introducing laws that enhance penalties for crimes if they are motivated by racial, gender or religious hatred. The Pakistan Penal Code is fairly rigorous on the subject of hate crimes of all kind. However, we have two serious and pressing issues. Firstly, contradictory laws like the blasphemy laws challenge the ability to prosecute under the Pakistan Penal Code and secondly, over the decades, we have seen less and less implementation of the Penal Code as in the protection of rights of our minority citizens.”

Even India doesn’t have many stringent laws against racism, discrimination and incitement to discrimination. Minorities have never been treated well in this largest democracy of the world and bloody rioting has often been witnessed in the past 30 years or so. A lot of recommendations in this regard have regularly been sent to the Indian government over the years by various NGOs like ‘Justice for Loitam Richard,’ but to no avail. One such set of proposals was sent by the NGO ‘Justice for Loitam Richard’ to the union home minister of India quite recently on May 17, 2012 to help push hate out of Indian communities. ‘Justice for Loitam Richard’ was formed in memory of Richard Loitam, a student of architectural engineering at Bangalore’s Acharya NRV School of Architecture who was allegedly beaten by hostel inmates on racial grounds on April 17 this year and was found dead on his bed the following day.

To be continued


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Pakistan yet to legislate on the menace of hate crime — II

Whole world undoubtedly struggling to curb violence against minorities

The May 2, 2012 edition of ‘The Times of India’ had reported: “A movement that started in the social media seeking justice for Richard Loitam has gone viral, with 170,042 members and counting, joining the cause.”

The police later registered a murder case against two students, a Muslim and a Hindu.

There is hardly a place on the earth where people are not targeted on the basis of their perceived affiliation to a certain religion, caste, colour, creed, ethnicity, sexual orientation and nationality, etc, but timely enactment of hate crime laws in many countries is believed to have reduced such bias-motivated incidents partially, if not fully.

Research conducted by ‘The News’ reveals that in 2002, the European Convention on Cybercrime was supplemented with a protocol that purports to criminalise “acts of a racist and xenophobic nature committed through computer systems.”

(Reference: The US Department of Justice and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s October 12, 2001 report titled ‘Racism and Xenophobia in Cyberspace’)

The European Convention report states: “When migration waves arise, people soon start expressing anger against other races through computer systems and other media. What does the European Union law prescribe about acts of racism and xenophobia committed through computer systems? This article informs on the European policy on this topic.”

Article 3 of this European Protocol requires member states to adopt legislative measures to criminalise the distribution of racist and xenophobic material through the use of computer systems. In United Kingdom, a tentative glance through the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and Sections 45 and 46 of Criminal Justice Act 2003 shows that hateful behaviour towards a victim based on the victim’s membership (or presumed membership) in a racial group or a religious group can lead to aggravated prison sentences in British law.

In Italy, Section 3 of Law No 205/1993 of the Italian Criminal Law contains a penalty-enhancement provision for all crimes motivated by racial, ethnic, national, or religious bias.

In Spain, Article 22(4) of the Spanish Penal Code includes a penalty-enhancement provision for crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s ideology, beliefs, religion, ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, illness or disability.

In Poland, where the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance had strongly encouraged the Polish authorities to enact such legislation in June 2005, a lot of progress has been made in a number of areas. The Framework Convention for the Protection of the National Minorities entered into force in 2001.

Meanwhile, the Polish authorities have since started to raise the awareness of the police and the judiciary to the need to combat racist offences more effectively. The Polish government had come up with a Programme for Countering Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in 2004 though despite all these aforementioned initiatives, Poland is still struggling to harness the monster of hate crime. An April 1, 2011 reported of a reputed British newspaper ‘The Guardian’ states: “A Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)-sponsored investigation has uncovered nearly 200 serious hate crimes at recent football matches in Poland and Ukraine.”

‘The Guardian’ had gone on to publish: “There have been 133 reported incidents in Poland over the 18 months, according to the report, 56 of which related to the open display of racist or fascist symbols. Black players in Poland have experienced hostility at many grounds and there have been 20 reported ‘anti-black’ hate crimes. There were 36 reported anti-Semitic incidents at Polish football matches.”

In Belgium, the February 25, 2003 Act aimed at combating discrimination had established a penalty-enhancement for crimes involving discrimination on the basis of sex, supposed race, colour, descent, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, civil status, birth, fortune, age, religious and philosophical beliefs, etc. In Denmark, where the law does not otherwise include explicit hate crime provisions, Section 80(1) of the Criminal Code instructs courts to take into account the gravity of the offence and the offender’s motive when meting out penalty, and therefore, to attach importance to the racist motive of crimes in determining sentences. In recent years, the Danish judges have used this provision to increase sentences on the basis of racist motives.

(Reference: ‘Everyday Fears,’ written by Michael McClintock of Human Rights First, which is a 34-year old nonprofit, nonpartisan human rights organisation based in New York City and Washington DC)

In Sweden, Article 29 of the Swedish Penal Code includes a penalty-enhancement provision for crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s race, colour, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation or religion of the victim.

(Reference: Swedish Penal Code)

In the United States, the Mathew Shepard and James E Byrd Jr Hate Crime Prevention Act was signed into law on October 28, 2009 by President Barack Hussein Obama. The US House of Representatives passed this act on October 8, 2009.

It provided $5 million per year in funding for fiscal years 2010 through 2012 to help state and local agencies pay for investigating/prosecuting hate crimes, besides requiring the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to track statistics on hate crimes based on gender and gender identity. This Act is named after two victims of bias-motivated crimes in the United States. While one victim, Matthew Shepard, was a student tortured to death in 1998 in Wyoming state because he was perceived to be homosexual, the second casualty, James Byrd, was an African-American, who was violently killed by two white racists in Texas in 1998. Matthew Shepard’s killers were given life sentences in Wyoming and two of James Byrd’s murderers were sentenced to death.

CNN had quoted US Attorney General, Attorney General Eric Holder, in one of its reports, saying: “More than 77,000 hate crime incidents were reported by the FBI between 1998 and 2007, or nearly one hate crime for every hour of every day over the span of a decade.” The FBI statistics reveal that even after enactment of this law, 8,208 hate crimes were reported by this law-enforcement American agency in 2010. Of these, 48.2 per cent were race related — with 70 per cent of those having an anti-black bias.

The most frequently reported bias motivations were anti-white, anti-Jewish, anti-Islamic, anti-Hispanic, and against a person’s sexual orientation.

The FBI website interestingly states: “Crimes of hatred and prejudice — from lynching to cross burnings to vandalism of synagogues — are a sad fact of American history, but the term ‘hate crime’ did not enter the nation’s vocabulary until the 1980s, when emerging hate groups like the Skinheads launched a wave of bias-related crime. The FBI began investigating what we now call hate crimes as far back as World War I, when the Ku Klux Klan first attracted our attention.”

Just to recall, very recently in August 2012, six men were killed in deadly shooting at a Sikh temple in the United States and a mosque was set ablaze.

Earlier on July 4, 2012, an unidentified suspect had thrown a petrol bomb onto the roof of the same mosque. The FBI did offer a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the man behind the July incident, but no one has been apprehended yet.

(References: The Associated Press report of June 8, 1999, the Colorado Independent edition of October 9, 2009, the US National Centre for Transgender Equality. The Huffington Post, the US Senate website and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Hate Crime statistics 2010) In Canada, the legal definition of hate crime can be found in sections 318 and 319 of the country’s Criminal Code.

In 1996 the federal government amended a section (Section 718.2) of the Criminal Code that pertains to sentencing. In Canada, during 2004, Jewish people were the largest ethnic group targeted by hate crimes, followed by blacks, Muslims, South Asians, and gays and lesbians.

Although the Canadian courts have been sentencing people found guilty in hate based crime in cases pertaining to race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, etc, no end for hate-related violence is in sight here as well. In the 1920s and 1930s, anti-Semitism was a major deal in Canada, due to the rise of the Nazi government in Germany.

(Reference: ‘Crime in Canadian Context: Debates and Controversies,’ a book authored by William O’Grady)

Historically, the global hate crime phenomenon became more pronounced and noticeable in 1930s and mid 1940s, when Adolf Hitler’s Nazis had reportedly massacred about one million Jews in planned genocide, often referred in history books as ‘The Final Solution’ or the ‘Holocaust.’

(Reference: ‘Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews’ by Francois Furet)

 

[Rusty]

Pakistan can legislate until the end of time and it won't matter.
The bigger problem is lack of enforcement and corruption of the whole system.
What good are the laws when the people who are there to enforce them, themselves violate them freely?