France

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 refer to a particular 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 prisoners 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 offences 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 offence 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.