Hate crimes are "criminal acts motivated by bias or prejudice towards particular groups of people" [1] based on actual or perceived race, ethnicity, language, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, gender or any other "fundamental characteristic". Their impact extends beyond the immediate victim, harming the wider community with which the victim identifies.

While there is no single universally binding definition of hate crime, nor a dedicated international treaty addressing it as such, the normative foundation of states’ obligations in relation to hate crimes is grounded in international human rights law. In particular, obligations relating to non-discrimination, equal protection and effective remedy, enshrined in instruments such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which require states to ensure effective protection against bias-motivated violence through their domestic legal systems, including through criminal law.

At the regional and international levels, hate crime frameworks vary significantly in scope. The framework established by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the most widely used operational reference across 57 participating States, includes gender and sexual orientation as protected characteristics. In the EU, Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA requires racist and xenophobic motivation to be considered an aggravating circumstance; however, gender and sexual orientation remain outside its current scope, notwithstanding a pending proposal from the European Commission. The Council of Europe recommends extending the framework to sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) (see, SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) rights) [2].

In the most serious cases, hate speech and bias-motivated conduct may rise to the level of international crimes when they are sufficiently grave and directly connected to violence against a civilian population. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) established in the landmark Media Case [3] that speech acts systematically dehumanising a group can constitute persecution as a crime against humanity and direct incitement to genocide. Building on this precedent, FIDH and its partners submitted an Article 15 Communication to the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in June 2024, arguing that a sustained campaign of state-sponsored hate speech (calls for violence, dehumanisation, denigration, pathologisation, creating false or distorted narratives, etc.), by prominent Russian media figures and political officials against Ukrainians could amount to the crime against humanity of persecution under Article 7(1)(h) of the ICC Rome Statute. The submission explicitly linked such speech to crimes including "rape and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence" and argued that it created a climate of "discriminatory hate" and violence, that normalised and enabled the commission of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) with impunity [4].

More specifically, gender-based hate crimes are criminal offences in which the perpetrator selects or targets the victim on the basis of gender. They disproportionately affect women and individuals perceived as not conforming to dominant gender norms, and encompass conduct ranging from femicide and gender-motivated killing, to sexual violence committed with demonstrable gender-based hostility, and crimes targeting LGBTQIA+ persons on grounds of SOGI [5]. By recognising bias motivation as an aggravating element and broader community harm as a legally relevant consequence, the hate crime framework captures gender-based violence at multiple levels, addressing not only the harm to the individual victim but the deliberate attack on the identity and dignity of the group as a whole. Bias-motivated rhetoric can facilitate and normalise SGBV by dehumanising target groups, creating the ideological climate and impunity in which such violence is committed. Despite growing recognition of gender as a protected characteristic in hate crime frameworks, the prosecution of SGBV specifically as a hate crime remains rare in practice.