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	As FIFA attempts to curb racism at the World Cup, a look at hate speech laws worldwide by Pew Research Center, Minority Rights Group   June 2014   Reports of racist and xenophobic slurs against players and fans have continued to emerge during the World Cup. Two fans were arrested last weekend after chanting racist remarks during the match featuring Argentina vs. Bosnia-Herzegovina.   In an attempt to combat hate speech during the tournament, FIFA and Brazilian authorities initiated an anti-racism campaign using the hashtag #SayNoToRacism. Hate speech is taken seriously in Brazil, where racist or religiously intolerant speech or actions are prohibited by law and carry penalties including imprisonment.   Brazil is not the only country with a law that penalizes hate speech. A new Pew Research analysis finds hate speech laws in 89 countries around the world (45%), according to 2012 data. In some countries, the laws protect only certain religious or social groups, while others have broader laws, covering words or actions that insult, denigrate or intimidate a person or group based on race, gender, religion, ethnicity or other traits.   Although these laws are on the books, in some countries they are not enforced. However, in countries where penalties are imposed for hate speech, they often include fines or short-term jail sentences. A spectator in Spain was arrested earlier this year on suspicion of throwing a banana at a Brazilian player, and in 2012, a man in the United Kingdom received a jail sentence for posting racist and offensive comments on Twitter after a player collapsed on the field.   Laws against hate speech are most common in Europe, where 84% of countries (38 of 45) have such laws or policies (as of 2012). In 2008, the European Union passed a framework decision to combat hate speech and other expressions of racism and xenophobia – although member states have yet to consistently enforce the decision. In France, inciting racial or ethnic hatred is illegal, and non-citizens may be deported for such actions.   Some European countries have hate speech laws in place that include policies specifically targeting soccer and other sporting events. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the Football Offences Act (initially passed in 1991) prohibits racist chanting at football matches. In Spain, it is illegal to incite hatred because of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, nationality or sexual orientation, and athletic teams and stadiums can face sanctions for “actions that disparage religion if committed by professional athletic clubs, players or fans during sporting events,” according to the U.S. State Department.   Similar measures are in effect in nine of the 20 countries in the Middle East-North Africa region (45%) and more than a third of the countries in the Asia-Pacific region (38%, or 19 of 50). In Indonesia, for example, it is illegal to incite hatred toward individuals or community groups because of race, religion or ethnicity.   Hate speech laws were present in a quarter of countries in sub-Saharan Africa as of 2012 (12 of the 48 countries) and about three-in-ten countries in the Americas (31%, 11 of 35).   In the United States, courts have traditionally struck down attempts to limit hate speech. Most recently, during a 2011 case involving one of the Westboro Baptist Church’s anti-gay protests at a military funeral (Snyder v. Phelps), the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. Athletes occasionally encounter racist comments in the United States, often on Twitter.   This analysis is based on our ongoing research on global restrictions on religion. For more on our sources and procedures, see our most recent report on the topic.   http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/20/as-fifa-attempts-to-curb-racism-at-the-world-cup-a-look-at-hate-speech-laws-worldwide/ http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Minority/Pages/Stories.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/MinorityIssues/Session7/GAReport_SR_MinorityIssues_en.pdf   July 2014   Hate crime towards minorities and indigenous peoples is a daily reality in many countries across the globe, says Minority Rights Group International (MRG) in its annual report, but is often ignored by authorities.   The international organisation"s flagship report, State of the World"s Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2014, focuses on ‘Freedom from hate and presents compelling evidence showing that hate crime and hate speech are prevalent in all regions of the world.   But hate crime is widely ignored, under-reported and often left unchecked by governments, resulting in escalating violence against minorities, says MRG in the report.   "If governments ignore hate crime, the perpetrators see it as a green light to continue," says Mark Lattimer, MRG"s Executive Director. ‘The prevalence of hate crimes against minorities is widely under-estimated and is now being driven across borders by online propaganda, whether by sectarian jihadis or right-wing racists."   The report finds that targeted violence often has a purpose. Anti-migrant rhetoric in Greece or sectarian violence in India serves to consolidate the power base of extremist organizations. Negative representations of indigenous groups in Guatemala or Uganda may provide justification for further exclusion or eviction from ancestral lands.   The impact of hatred may extend beyond discrimination to more visible extremes, as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it drives the continuation of inter-ethnic conflicts. In the Central African Republic, hate speech and targeted attacks during 2013 were responsible for fomenting religious violence that has resulted in almost a million people being internally displaced.   Hate crimes send a message not only to the individuals targeted, but also to their communities. This is especially evident in violence against minority and indigenous women, with rape and sexual assault employed as a weapon of war or an instrument of oppression to fragment and humiliate entire civilian populations, says MRG.   In South Asia, for example, Dalit women are regularly subjected to sexual violence as a result of their lower caste status - often in response to their demands for basic rights.   The prevalence of demeaning or inflammatory language in political discourse, sermons, the media and online has very real implications for marginalized communities. The report highlights many countries in 2013 where rumours and incitement led to violence and loss of life.   In Burma, where a slow process of reform has opened up some degree of free expression, the situation for minorities is acute. In addition to reports of ongoing military abuses against ethnic minorities, a large number of Muslim Rohingya were murdered or displaced during 2013 by Buddhist vigilantes.   In Russia, official repression and discrimination of migrants from Central Asia and elsewhere has occurred alongside attacks and intimidation by extremists.   In Pakistan, despite the first democratic transfer of power between two elected governments in the country"s history, hundreds of Shi"a were killed in targeted attacks and other minorities such as Ahmadis also singled out.   The 2011 Arab Spring has had mixed implications for ethnic and religious minorities in the region. In Egypt, for example, a new constitution was passed in January 2014 that contained a number of new legal guarantees for minorities. Nevertheless, 2013 was marked by a series of violent attacks against religious minorities.   In Syria, civil conflict took on an increasingly sectarian character during the year. In July, the United Nations estimated that more than 100,000 people had died in the violence and by the end of the year the number of IDPs stood at 6.5 million, while the refugee population grew to 2.3 million.   In Iraq, 2013 saw the country"s highest death toll in five years, with smaller minorities such as Sabean Mandeans, Christians, Yezidis, Turkmen and Shabak continuing to be targeted with abductions and killings.   In Europe, the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis and the impact of austerity measures in many countries have played a major role in the rise of right-wing organizations with a strong anti-minority agenda. In Hungary, Jobbik"s rhetoric against the country"s Roma and Jewish minorities escalated as the party won a major place in mainstream politics, with its share of the national vote rising to more than 20 percent in the April 2014 elections.   Historical patterns of colonialism and segregation continue to be felt in some countries. In the USA migrants, Jews, African Americans and other minorities are still subject to vilification, particularly with the apparent rise of hate groups in recent years, in part due to anxieties over the country"s changing demographics.   While the 2014 State of the World"s Minorities and Indigenous Peoples documents disheartening levels of violence, harassment and verbal abuse across the world, it also includes many examples of how hatred is being countered by legislators, politicians, journalists, and communities, by addressing the root causes. Though there is still a long way to go before minorities and indigenous peoples across the world are able to enjoy freedom from hate, these and other initiatives highlighted in the report show some of the ways forward.   ‘The impact on victims of violent crime is well-known, but when such crimes are motivated by ethnic or religious hatred, whole communities are made to feel under attack. Hate crimes need to be recognised as such, and the perpetrators punished." says Mark Lattimer.   http://www.minorityrights.org/12473/state-of-the-worlds-minorities/state-of-the-worlds-minorities-and-indigenous-peoples-2014.html Visit the related web page
	Indian women are asking for more autonomy and freedom by Amartya Sen, Sen Lam, LSE, Radio Australia, agencies   13 June 2014   As the global summit on sexual violence in conflict wraps up in London, we speak with a woman who"s one of the leaders in India against such crimes.   Kavita Krishnan has long championed the rights of women workers and labourers, and of Dalit women in India. She says capitalism has alot to answer for.   Reporter: Sen Lam Speaker: Kavita Krishnan, secretary, All India Progressive Women"s Association and a leader in India"s Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)   KRISHNAN: I think capitalism defines much of the societies in which we live all over the world. We need to really examine the ways in which that sets the perimeters in which violence occurs. For instance, capitalism itself, does unleash a lot of violence.   If you think of the Bangladesh factory fire, women worked in factories in those conditions, imagine what they were subjected to in their daily lives, the extreme insecurity and exploitation to which they were subjected. And in the era of austerity measures, think about what that"s doing to women"s lives, because there is far less support that women are able to draw upon. The state doesn"t own up its responsibilities to women and it tells women that taking care of children, taking care of the poor, taking care of the sick and so on, is their job.   LAM: So, can you set this in an Indian context for us?   KRISHNAN: Yes, even in an Indian context we find that Indian governments which have embraced the whole new liberal paradigm of economic policies, they speak about women"s empowerment, but in actual terms the kind of work which women are getting is extremely insecure, extremely casualised, contractualised. And the minute women ask for the most minimal of human rights at the work place, even the right to visit the toilet as often as they need, they might lose their jobs for doing so. Especially if they are single mothers, battling everyday misogyny inside the home, you can imagine that this makes their struggle much harder.   Capitalism takes advantage of the misogynists that we have. Women in the government schemes for rural health, thousands of women are employed in these schemes and they are not paid a wage, they are paid a small pittance, which is called an incentive money and when they demand wages, when they say we are government employees pay us, the government says well, you serve your family for free and in the same way, you are volunteers, you are serving society for free.   Clearly, the idea of male entitlement, masculine entitlement, which is at the root of violence is something which is not unique to to India, it takes different shapes across the world.   And India, what we are trying to expand the conversation to not remain focused around violence alone, but to actually talk about the kinds of ways in which we teach entitlement to men and what is at the bottom of that entitlement, because essentially, the kind of discipline which we use inside the home, to ensure that women perform what are called "women"s roles" properly. This is something which is actually needed by the kind of exploitative society we live in, the capitalist society we live in.   LAM: The people of India certainly have put huge faith in the new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, to turn their lives around for the better. I get the impression that you might not be so sure?   KRISHNAN: I think that we have good cause to be quite apprehensive about this government and its policies for many reasons. As women, particularly because he enjoys the support, the active support of a whole lot of right wing organisations, whose everyday practice and ideology revolves around telling him what women can and can"t do, what kind of clothes they"re allowed to wear, who they"re allowed to marry. And also in inciting violence against men of the minority community, of the oppressed cast, because they have supposedly ventured beyond they"re role and they might be having a relationship with a Hindu woman and so on.   LAM: And yet, recently, the Modi government was quite swift in responding to the rapes and murders of two young girls from a lower caste, that there will be zero tolerance. Is that at least a step in the right direction?   KRISHNAN: Well, you know, in responding in that particular instance was not very difficult for them (the BJP), because that was a state government ruled by another party. And I think that they reduced the whole issue to the issue of availability of toilet. And those women were not strung up from a tree because there was no toilets, you know. This is an issue of caste hierarchy.   Indian women are asking for more autonomy and freedom and none of these things bodes really well for that.   LAM: Every northern winter, we process stories of the homeless, dying in the cold, especially in cities like Delhi. Give us your take on homelessness in India, what"s the cause of it?   KRISHNAN: I think that when one talks about poverty and homelessness, we tend to talk about it in the frames of charity or the lack of it.   And I really think that we need to turn that around and we need to talk about in terms of the priorities of a government. We need to ask why is it that governments in their spending priorities can"t make housing a priority for spending. How is it that they cannot ensure that people have a home to live in and that people have hygienic water supply, electricity supply. These are basic necessities, as is education, as is health and I really think that our priorities are skewered.   If I speak about India, if you look at budgetary spending, our successive governments have given away millions and billions of rupees in tax breaks for big corporations, the richest corporations we have and I think this would be the same story across the world.   And really you need to ask why is that you afford that and yet you say, you don"t call those subsidies, those are actually subsidies for the rich. And yet you say we don"t have money to subsidise the poor. If you don"t like the word socialist, that"s no problem, but actually examine the system you live in.   June 2014   Inequality: Amartya Sen says Thomas Piketty is Right.   In an interview with LSE’s editor Joel Suss, Amartya Sen discusses Thomas Piketty’s recent work, the consequences of widening inequality, and his views on India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose BJP party won the country’s 2014 general election.   Thomas Piketty and other academics have documented the growth in income and wealth inequality in many countries around the world, however the repercussions of widening inequality are perhaps less well understood. What are your thoughts on the consequences of inequality?   These are good questions. Inequality has to be viewed not only in terms of its consequences, but also as something that we have reason to disapprove of in its own right. So you have to go beyond the consequences. There’s an increase in inequality in many countries in the world and we should be worried about that.   You’ve mentioned Piketty’s work, and I know that there’s a debate over this subject, in any study of this kind you have to use diverse sources of data, and it is inescapable that you have to establish certain linkages on which it is possible to have debates. Are the conclusions drawn from them fairly robust? I believe they are. I think that Piketty’s conclusions stand to many countries which he discusses – they certainly apply to the United States very well. So I think that the summary story that inequality has been growing quite sharply in recent decades, and in recent years in particular, is true. We therefore have reason to worry as to whether this is acceptable socially, and also what the consequences are.   Now coming to the consequences, these very much depend on what kind of inequality we’re discussing. If you compare for example China with India, the inequality level judged in terms of income distribution is no less in China than in India – according to some measures it is even higher in China. But the fact that despite the inequality in China there is close to 100 per cent literacy and nearly 100 per cent health coverage – at least of some kind — in a way that doesn’t exist in India – means that inequality has had a more severe effect in India than it has in China. On the other hand, if you were to leave economics to one side and look at the distribution of political power, then of course there you could identify some advantages on the Indian side: namely that because of democracy and multi-party politics, people have more opportunity to express their views and to choose among many different parties than they have in China. So you really have to look at the nature of the inequality we’re examining to be able to assess what its consequences should be.   You have criticised Narendra Modi, the recently elected Indian Prime Minister, and his party for their Hindu-nationalist outlook. Did Modi’s decision to quickly invite the President of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, to his inauguration surprise you?   Was it a good move? Yes indeed, it was a very good move. Second, did it surprise me? No, it didn’t surprise me because it’s an intelligent move of a kind that Modi should be able to think of. Even though I’m critical of his tendency to favour the majority Hindu community compared with minorities, and I am critical of the fact that, at least in the past, he has tended to neglect – judging by the record of Gujarat – education and healthcare and has concentrated only on physical infrastructure, I’ve never thought that Mr Modi isn’t a very intelligent man and capable of being pragmatic.   The third point concerns a more difficult issue and is, in some sense, a more profound point to consider. When India was partitioned, it was the Congress Party (and the Indian secularists) who claimed that there was no difference between Hindus and Muslims – that there wasn’t going to be a Hindu country and a Muslim country. The claim of the great leader of the Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was to say that there would be a Muslim Pakistan and there should be a Hindu India. So if India moves to become more of a Hindu India now, then that would be something which is quite acceptable to the Pakistan tradition of ‘we are Muslim Pakistan, you are Hindu India’. Modi fits into that pattern much more easily.   So in some ways, at that level of the Indo-Pakistan relationship, there isn’t any great problem in thinking of India as a Hindu India coming to terms with a Muslim Pakistan on an equitable basis. In the past, of course, the Indian position has always been that they are not on a symmetric footing: that India is a secular country in a way that Pakistan has not tried to be. In Pakistan a dominant self-perception is that of being a Muslim nation in a way that India’s perception is not that of being a Hindu nation. This is something that even Modi cannot change, and if he’s pragmatic (and he can be expected to be that), he wouldn’t try to change that.   Regarding the Indian relationship with Pakistan, I don’t expect a great tension there. However, India becoming more militaristically inclined may be a problem because that is certainly more of a BJP line. After all, it was they who blasted the nuclear bomb in 1998 even though India had already done testing before in the mid-70s. There was no particular need for India to do new detonations in 1998, but it gave Pakistan a good excuse to have their own – first time – blasts (not just on paper) citing India’s new round of actual testing.   I hope this time, the BJP will be more careful with the relationship between India and Pakistan. The mere fact of a new view of a “Hindu India” meeting Muslim Pakistan is not going to be a problem in itself in terms of Indo-Pakistani relations.   The real issue concerns what happens inside India. It is not easy to make India – with its multi-religious mix, its secular constitution – into just “a Hindu country.” There is a Supreme Court, a secular constitution, a media, a general public. Even though Modi and the BJP were very successful at the 2014 Indian general election, achieving victory with over 50 per cent of the seats, they only received 31 per cent of the vote. The majority of Indians are not clamouring to live in a majoritarian Hindu country. That’s a very serious diagnosis to bear in mind.
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