Organised by the Council of Europe in partnership with the Croatian Agency for Electronic Media

Zagreb, Croatia, 6-7 November 2018

Hate speech and offensive language targeting ethnic, religious, sexual minorities, immigrants and other groups is a widespread phenomenon within Europe. The Council of Europe and its member States through various measures and initiatives have undertaken to tackle this issue, while guaranteeing everyone the fundamental right to freedom of expression and information.

Media have an important role to play in generating and disseminating such discourse and also in lending its voice and power to fight against it. Technological developments bring also significant challenges that the media and the content regulators have to face.

Preventing and countering hate speech in the media is a multidimensional task and requires a complete package of differentiated but complementary strategies, involving a range of stakeholders, i.e. national media regulatory authorities, media self-regulatory bodies, the judiciary the media as well as the citizens themselves.

The international conference examined how hate discourse is regulated in different member States of the Council of Europe focusing on the specific role and work of national regulatory authorities, the judiciary and media self-regulatory bodies.

Watch: Patrick Penninckx, Head of the Information Society Department, Council of Europe, explaining the aim of the conference

Watch: Tomas Åberg, Project Manager at the Swedish organisation “Online Hate Speech Monitor”, on his participation to the conference

Watch: Menno Ettema, Project Manager, Anti-discrimination Department, Council of Europe, on his participation to the conference