hate crimes
Criminal act driven by prejudice — an aggravating circumstance under Danish law
A hate crime is a criminal act motivated wholly or partly by the perpetrator's hatred of or prejudice against the group the victim belongs to or is assumed to belong to. The decisive feature is the combination of two elements: an underlying criminal act — for example assault, homicide, threats or vandalism — and a discriminatory motive linked to the victim's race, colour, national or ethnic origin, belief, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.
Under Danish law, hate crimes are not gathered into a single self-contained statutory definition. The matter is regulated primarily through the Danish Penal Code (straffeloven) § 81, no. 6, which provides that it is an aggravating circumstance in sentencing if an offence is motivated by the victim's membership of a particular group. In addition, straffeloven § 266 b regulates hateful expression, but that provision differs in that it criminalises the statement itself rather than an accompanying physical act.
The concept is central to understanding cases such as the 2019 synagogue attack in Halle, where the perpetrator explicitly directed the attack against the Jewish population, and the NSU case in Germany, where a neo-Nazi network selected victims on ethnic grounds over a period of years. Both cases illustrate how the discriminatory motive is not merely a legal add-on, but constitutes the very core of the offence's character and its harm to society.
A particular aspect of hate crimes is their generalised effect: the attack strikes not only the individual victim, but sends an intimidating signal to the entire group the victim represents. This is one of the reasons legislation treats the motive as an aggravating circumstance rather than mere background information. Cases such as the Jussie Smollett case in Chicago put the concept under pressure from another angle: when an alleged hate crime turns out to have been staged, it underlines the importance of thorough investigation of the motive — and illustrates that false reports can damage the credibility of genuine victims and the police resources available to investigate actual hate crimes.
