
France
France regularly reports hate crime data to ODIHR. France's hate crime laws are a combination of general and specific penalty-enhancement provisions. Hate crime data are collected by the Ministry of Justice, the National Institution for Human Rights, the police and the Gendarmerie. Hate crime data are regularly published by the National Institution for Human Rights. France conducts regular surveys of hate crime victimization.
How hate crime data is collected
When reported, all committed offences are given a criminal qualification code and label by police officers: each code and its label exactly refer to an article of the penal code. In France, hate crime is defined by crime definitions in the criminal code. Depending on the type of offence, up to five bias motivations can be recorded: religion, racism, xenophobia, sexism and homophobia.
Frontline police officers identify and record hate crimes the moment they are reported based on victim perception and/or objective facts and circumstances that suggest the offence was bias-motivated. Police officers use a generic form to record hate crimes. Some fields, notably the criminal qualification codes and labels, are computed into a national database that compiles statistics on hate crime. There is an instruction document to guide officers in recording hate crimes.
The Ministry of the Interior is responsible for two data collection processes. All security forces are connected to a central registration system. Data on hate crimes can be extracted from this database using the criminal qualification code under which they have been recorded. In addition to the central registration system, data on hate crimes have been manually collected since 2008 from local field offices by central intelligence services to specifically evaluate anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim offences. These data are discussed with Jewish and Muslim civil society organizations.
The Ministerial Statistical Department for Internal Security (SSMSI) at the Ministry of the Interior is responsible for producing reliable criminal statistics, and it publishes studies related to hate crime statistics on its Interstats website. The Ministry of Justice collects data from across the judiciary. The registration of data is subject to a strict and rigorous quality assurance process, based on a common codification called the "justice reference system", which groups together all criminal offenses and allows the data to be cross-referenced, according to the number of cases (registered, prosecuted, sentenced), the type of motivation (homophobic, gender, racism, etc.), the type of offense and the type of criminal sanction. The Department of Statistics and Studies (SDSE) of the Ministry of Justice centralizes and uses statistical data coming from prosecutors' offices, from the Cassiopée information system (registration and processing proceedings) and final convictions entered in the criminal records. These data are published in the Annual Report on Racism, Antisemitism and Xenophobia prepared by the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH).
A working group including the Ministerial Statistical Service of Internal Security (SSMSI), the Departmental Statistical Service of the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Criminal Affairs and Pardons (DACG) has been meeting since 2015. The group's objectives are to improve the methodology and produce comparable data on specific issues, particularly hate crimes.
Official Data
Hate crimes recorded by police
The police provide data broken down by racism and xenophobia (which also includes anti-religious hate crime) and bias against sexual orientation and gender identity (also including sex-based hate crimes). The anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hate crimes presented below have been disaggregated separately by the Ministry of the Interior and are included in the above mentioned two categories.
National developments
France amended the Criminal Code to simplify its hate crime provisions. Most specific penalty enhancements were removed and the general penalty enhancing provisions strengthened.
The Ministry of Justice participated in the development of the new National Plan to Combat Racism and Anti-Semitism for 2018-2020, which defines four priorities: 1. Fight against hatred on the internet, 2. Educate against prejudices, 3. Protect citizens and support victims, and 4. Invest in new mobilisation fields.
International reports
No information is available.
Key observation
ODIHR observes that France has not reported to ODIHR the numbers of prosecuted hate crime cases.