Hate Speech against Religious Minorities

Details

Topic: Identifying and countering "hate speech" against religious minorities

Date: 29-30 March 2017

Venue: the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia

Objectives

• to enable a national organisation to develop a position on policy and policy responses on "hate speech" in the national context;
• to use positive examples in advancing the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion and belief. 

Focus

• specific examples of "hate speech"
• the role of national human rights institutions in the issue
• the role of national institutions in the issue
• how national institutions play their role in this particular area in the national context 

Day 1: 29 March 2017

• Introduction 
• Identifying Hate Speech
• Responding to Hate Speech - Positive measures and restrictive measures

Day 2: 30 March 2017

• Tailoring responses to "hate speech" in the national context
• Closing

Representatives from Europe were Bea Bodrogi (Hungary) and Amy (UK). From the United States or perhaps Canada was Frederick Krakowski. Malaysian CSO representatives were Nalini Elumalai from Article 19 Malaysia and Maryam Lee from Project Dialogue. 

Documents

Click links below for reference.

• Art 18 - Art 20: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)
• Hate speech cases under the European Commission of Human Rights
• UNGA Resolution adopted by the HRC 16/18 - Combating intolerance, stereotyping and stigmatisation of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against, persons based on religion or belief (Agenda item 9; 12 April 2011)
• Annual report of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights - the expert workshops on the prohibition of incitement to national, racial or religious hatred (Agenda item 2; 11 Jan 2013).

Disclaimer: This is just an individual sharing. Opinions that I have here does not reflect any organisation. They are merely personal opinions and views. 

Breaking News in December 2016

I think it is good to keep track with breaking news around the world. There are many incidents happening around the world, every day. A good way to keep track with these events is to monitor medias in all of its mediums such as through:

• Conventional media, through newspapers, radio and television; and
• Integrated media, by using the internet such as Youtube visual media archive and online newspapers.

The use of large-scale monitoring techniques by computer scientists enabled the exploration of different aspects of the media system such as the visualisation of the media-sphere, the sentimental and objectivity analyses of news content. 

What is media monitoring? It is the activity of monitoring the output of the print, online and broadcast media. It can be conducted for a variety of reasons, including political, commercial, scientific and so on. The answer does not seem contradictory to the method enlisted up there, right? 

What is the rationale of media monitoring in social science? It is deployed by social scientists in an attempt to discover, for example, biases in the way the same event is presented in different media, among the media of different countries and others. What I could positively think about the rationale of monitoring global issues around the world is that most bodies dealing with common global issues would have to monitor these matters in order to decide on how their external policies would look like. It evolves by time since diplomatic relations requires hypocrisy in order to secure a state or an actor's interest in the world stage. 

The most recent breaking global news in December 2016 is:

• Palestine-Israel ongoing issues
• European migrant crisis;
• South Sudan crisis;
• Yemen civil war;
• Syrian government launched attack in Aleppo;
• The assassination of Russian Ambassador to Turkey;
• Rohingya ethnic massacre in Myanmar;
• Rodrigo Duterte war on drug pushers in the Philippines.

Some medias, for example, the British Broadcasting (BBC) provide basic background about what happened in a certain region. The news is also divided into regions under the World column, e.g in the Guardian UK. It allows audiences to have a basic understanding of what happened around the world. They could form their perception and view afterwards. 

As a training, we could give some background for the topics in the list, record some sources and provide some analyses. It might be general analyses but we may also link it to a certain field or common thematic studies.