The Legal Regulation of Hate Speech: The International and European Frameworks

This paper looks at the tools available on an international and European level in relation to the legal regulation of hate speech. More particularly, it considers the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination along with related case-law of the respective monitoring committees. It looks at the European Convention on Human Rights and how the European Court of Human Rights interprets the limits of free speech when confronted with cases of hate speech. It also looks at the Framework Decision on Racism and Xenophobia of the European Union and the Additional Protocol to the Cybercrime Convention of the Council of Europe. Through the analysis it demonstrates that there is no common approach amongst international and European institutions on what hate speech is and the threshold which needs to be met for legal regulation to be permissible. It also demonstrates that the tools available focus only on some types of hate speech