AT A GLANCE
STAND-UP strives to create a comprehensive and holistic counter-hate crime framework that covers all components of the counter-hate process (reporting-investigating-prosecution-prevention (RIPP), embedded within a framework of victim support. In this way, the project ensures the complementarity of the work of different actors, leading to a streamlined and more efficient RIPP cycle, better victim support, and higher levels of trust between CSOs, law enforcement, judiciary, and victims.
Open Source INTelligence (OSINT) is used to understand hateful sentiments and speech in localised contacts, helping public authorities and CSOs to identify areas of intervention, at-risk groups, and the weight of hateful sentiments expressed online as an indicator of physical acts of hate offline, all multi-factorally disaggregated. A platform is developed for interagency data exchange. Activities to raise awareness of STAND-UP and its outcomes, as well as to heighten awareness of hate crime and its impact on victims, are carried out throughout the project.
OBJECTIVES
Among the objectives
- Enhance multi-agency cooperation in countering hate crime by establishing harmonised definitions of hate crime, embedded within a blueprint framework for cooperation.
- Standardise reporting procedures through the co-design and validation of a reporting forms for (1) law enforcement agencies and (2) CSOs/NGOs.
- Deepen relevant actors’ understanding of the phenomena of hate speech and hate crime, including the sentiments behind them on a local level through enhanced monitoring tools and skills. STAND-UP employs open-source intelligence-led monitoring mechanisms, piloted in two separate Italian municipalities.
- Strengthen victim support through awareness and skills on “sensitive investigation” and prosecution through which “victims are recognised and treated in a respectful, sensitive, tailored, professional and non-discriminatory manner” (Art 1.1 of the Victims’ Rights Directive), focusing on unbiased reporting and investigation procedures and LEA-CSO support networks, strengthening Art 8. of the same.
- Design and implement training for CSOs, LEAs, and prosecutors and judges on reporting, investigating, prosecuting, and preventing (RIPP) hate crimes and discrimination, with parallel victim support.
