Hate crime laws
have made the punishment of thoughtcrime a reality
By JON HOLBROOK
In recent years, a new class of criminal offence has
come to the fore in the UK: hate crime. This is a crime defined not by what the
offender does but by his beliefs and thoughts while doing it.
Until recently, hate crimes were limited to the
intentional stirring up of racial hatred, a crime dating back to the Race
Relations Act 1965. But since 2001, more characteristics have been protected by
the criminal law: religion in 2001, sexual orientation and disability in 2003,
and transgender in 2012. So there are now five characteristics recognised and
protected by the law.
Each act of parliament recognising a new
characteristic is met with a claim for recognition of another characteristic.
Comedian Rowan Atkinson even jokingly suggested that future legislation could
be extended to outlaw hatred directed at ‘people with big ears’. Still, a
serious case could be made for protecting women, the elderly and fat people, or
sub-cultures like Goths. In 2003, Viscount Colville proposed an amendment in
the House of Lords that would protect persons who were targeted on the basis of
race, religion or ‘other identifiable characteristics’.
These claims for further protections are merely
direction-of-travel arguments. And here’s the problem: the criminal law has
been travelling in the wrong direction for too long. The hate-crime reforms
over the years have seen one pragmatic but erroneous exception to principle
after another, each one justified by the previous ones. If race, why not
religion? And if race and religion, why
not race, religion and sexual orientation? The principle upon which hate-crime
legislation is based remains stubbornly unquestioned.
So it ought to come as good news that the body charged
with keeping the law under review, the Law Commission, has opened a
consultation about hate crime. Yet what
should be an opportunity for people to question the current direction of travel
is no such thing. The government has required the Law Commission to avoid all
questions of principle. The thrust of the consultation is simply: if race,
religion and sexual orientation, then why not race, religion, sexual
orientation and disability and transgender?
The consultation is concerned with the detail of
existing hate crime, and in particular, its three-level application: specific
hate crimes; crimes that are aggravated by hate; and enhanced sentencing on the
basis of an offender’s hate.