Ireland’s new hatred law is puzzling and ambiguous
By David Thunder, Mercator.
Irish Justice Minister Helen McEntee has pushed through a revised version of the controversial Hatred and Hate Offences Bill, now known as the Criminal Justice (Hate Offences) Bill 2022, in which the hate speech element has been removed, but a new category of crime, “offences aggravated by hatred,” has been created. After being amended in a rushed debate in the Senate, it passed through the Dáil, the lower house of the parliament, by a comfortable majority (78 in favour, 52 against) on Wednesday, October 23.
in September, the original Hatred and Hate Offences Bill, which included reinforced powers to prosecute citizens for unpublished speech, was withdrawn by the Irish Government after attracting a lot of negative publicity, both nationally and internationally. At the time, this was a major victory for the free speech movement. Even though the government’s embarrassing reversal left in place problematic hate speech legislation from 1989, it also killed amendments that would have made hate speech prosecutions easier to secure.
Now, the government has rushed a new version of the bill through both houses of the Parliament. The good news is, the hate speech elements have been removed – though Minister McEntee promises to reintroduce them if her government is re-elected in the upcoming election.
The bad news is, some deeply problematic elements have been preserved in the revised bill, most notably:
(1) the creation of a new category of crime, “offences aggravated by hatred” (yes, you’ve guessed it, “hatred” is nowhere actually defined in a non-circular manner) against any one of the “protected” groups listed in the legislation (race, colour, nationality, religion, national or ethnic origin, descent, gender, “sex characteristics,” sexual orientation, disability).