Ministry for Home Affairs will create units to fight hate crimes

The Ministry of Home Affairs has announced it will create units to fight hate crimes.

The Ministry for Home Affairs will create specific groups against hate crimes within the General Information Commissariat and the provincial information brigades of the National Police, as well as in the Information Headquarters of the Guardia Civil and in peripheral units.

This is one of the measures approved in the Follow-up Commission of the Action Plan to Combat Hate Crimes, chaired by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, and which analysed the plan’s action lines, which will be in force during the three-year period 2022-2024.

Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said it was vital to strengthen ties with organisations and institutions from all fields against hate crimes.

“Their collaboration has been key to the implementation of the first action plan and we are determined to further encourage their participation and listen to their proposals,” he said.

“We must also work specifically to tackle hate crimes motivated by anti-Gypsyism, which increased by more than 57 per cent in 2020,” he added.

The new plan will establish eight priority action lines and introduce new measures complementary to the first plan approved in March 2019, in force until 2021, which provided law enforcement with tools to deal with hate crimes and incidents, with a steady growth of around nine per cent per year since 2014.

Victim assistance and support will be central to the second action plan, with measures to be finalised in the coming weeks. Coordination mechanisms will also be strengthened between the State law enforcement forces and agencies and regional and local police forces, and crime prevention will be emphasised through the development of risk assessment tools, a procedure that is already applied in the VioGen system for the Comprehensive Monitoring of Gender Violence cases.

The Commission has also approved an increase in the personal resources of the National Office for Combating Hate Crimes, created in 2018.

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