HATE CRIME – CRIMINOLOGICAL AND LEGAL ASPECTS

Abstract

In their introduction, the authors have emphasized that even though hate crime has been criminalized in the XX century, it has existed throughout the entire human history. The overview of the first laws regulating hate crime has been laid out in the introduction as well. Special attention has been attached to the theoretical notion of this form of violent crimes. As the dissemination of hate crime is an important phenomenological data, the authors presented the results of the criminological studies on the dissemination of hate crime in the United States of America. Hate crime is not a uniform type of violent crimes, thus it is necessary to review its manifestation and appearances, as the authors sought to in this article. The victims themselves mostly suffer consequences of hate crime, so the next part of the article is focused on the consequences themselves. The final part relates to legal framework on hate, as a mandatory aggravating fact of certain crimes in Republic of Serbia, with overview of crimes that involve hate as element in their legal determination. At the same time, the authors aimed to show the results of the research on the application of the Article 54a of the Serbian Criminal Code in case-law of courts in Nis and Novi Sad.