Hate Crimes and Human Rights | The War in the Eyes

Visegrad Lecture Series

Hate Crimes and Human Rights: Making Sense of Violence in Europe after 1990

By Christopher Ewing, Assistant Professor of History, Purdue University

The early 1990s in Europe witnessed an outpouring of bias-motivated violence. Often understood by contemporary commentators, activists, and legislators as a problem of the collapse of eastern European communism, both bias-motivated attacks and incitement to violence appeared to be surging in western Europe as well. To address this problem, human rights organizations, specifically the International Helsinki Federation and the Human Rights Watch, increasingly used the framework of “hate,” derived from US law in the 1980s, to monitor and explain what was happening across Europe. This talk will show, however, that far from presenting an obvious target for international human rights work, the very fuzziness of the category of “hate” presented a challenge for international human rights organizations as they navigated violence in Europe after the Cold War. In the early 1990s, few international legal frameworks had been established to address hate, and North American and European laws that did address hate primarily focused on hate speech and incitement, rather than violence itself. In so doing, they challenged the commitment to freedom of expression that groups like the International Helsinki Federation and the Human Rights Watch had long espoused. This talk will untangle the challenges that hate and violence presented, explaining how the project of defining hate as a new political and legal category revealed the frictions between minority rights and human rights frameworks.

The War in the Eyes

By Alessandro Ingaria, Audiovisual Artist, Italy

The aim of the artistic research is to analyze the connection between the lives of Hungarian families and the fate of their nation. Hungary is a country that is strongly characterized by the 'national' question, marked by a specific historical experience that generates and consolidates identity traits. In this perspective, the research wanted to focus on the historical-political and social chronology of Hungary, for the period from the beginning of the last century, up to the recent events of the last few years, highlighting the intensity and persistence of the theme of the country's independence, in correlation with the evolution of the local social dynamics, from which a 'national character' of the country and a 'common national destiny' seem to emerge, linking citizens and families of the country, even in their domestic imagery. The artistic research project was structured with the goal of carrying out an audiovisual investigation into the imagery of families and citizens, in which political dynamics intertwine with people's private and intimate lives. In the future, an artistic product, with a poetical approach will complement the research.