Assessing Hate Crime Laws

"This is a must-read book for academics and students seeking innovative thinking about the legitimacy and reach of hate crime laws. Its novel analytical framework paves the way for a new generation of scholarship in hate crime legal studies. It also provides a valuable guide for lawmakers internationally when weighing the boundaries of state power in criminalising hateful conduct." - Paul Iganski, Professor Emeritus, Lancaster University Law School, UK. This book offers a critical analysis of hate crime law using Italy as a case study. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, it develops an international framework for mapping hate crime laws onto the phenomenon of hate crime itself, allowing for better legislation to be drafted. It shows how this analytical tool may be used in practice by applying it to legislation in Italy, where Parliament recently dismissed a legislative proposal to extend hate crime law to sex, gender,sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. The framework allows readers to critique the rationale behind hate crime laws and the effect of, or potential effect of, their implementation. This book ultimately seeks to answer to the question of how and whether States can legitimately introduce a harsher sentence for bias motivated crimes. It bridges interdisciplinary hate studies and more traditional legal analysis. It speaks to an international audience as well as to an audience with a specific interest in the Italian context. Lucille Micheletto is a legal adviser in Spanish Migration Law and Human Rights in Granada, Spain. She has a PhD in Law from Ghent University, Belgium. She has worked as a lawyer and researcher (also on the topic of hate crimes) in a number of European and International organisations (e.g. the European Court of Human Rights, the European Ombudsman, the European Agency for Fundamental Rights) and NGOs (e.g.the AIRE Centre, Amnesty International, Movimiento Por La Paz, Cassero LGBTI+ Center).