Beyond definitions. Longue durée and current challenges in addressing Hate Speech

“Hate speech” has not (yet) been defined in a watertight, authoritative, and universally accepted way, either in international human rights law or in social science and humanities scholarship. According to the Council of Europe, Hate Speech should be intended as “all types of expression that incite, promote, spread or justify violence, hatred or discrimination against a person or group of persons, or that denigrates them, by reason of their real or attributed personal characteristics or status such as “race”, colour, language, religion, nationality, national or ethnic origin, age, disability, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation”. However, such expressions may vary in their severity, the harm they cause and their impact on members of particular groups in different contexts, meaning that in most legal frameworks a certain threshold of intensity must be reached before a particular expression can be qualified, and juridically assessed against a series of contextual factors, as hate speech. Among these factors, the historical dimension and weight of its content – i.e. the semantic history and historical perception of a specific expression – should also be taken into account although is very often difficult to ascertain. On the other hand, several types of expressions (for example, long-term and well-established negative stereotypes) are not deemed to be sufficiently severe to be legitimately restricted under criminal and civil laws. Within this framework, this paper aims to

• historically contextualise the debate on hate speech from a legal point of view (when did criminal law, in Italy and beyond, started addressing hate speech?);
• Consider long-term stereotypes, and their effects on today’s (illegal) hate speech and freedom of expression;
• Present a sample of controversial case studies, and role of history (and historians) to solve them.

Federico Faloppa is a Professor Language and discrimination at the University of Reading (UK), where he is also the director of the MA in Migration and Intercultural Studies. For more than twenty years, his research has focused on the study of ethnic stereotypes, the linguistic construction of otherness, the relationship between language and power, multilingualism in migratory settings, and hate speech. Among his recent publications are Sbiancare un etiope. La costruzione di un immaginario razzista (2013; new revised edition 2022) and #Odio. Manuale di resistenza alla violenza delle parole (2020). He is  currently working on two monographs, respectively on ecolinguistics and language and power, which will be published by Einaudi and Bollati Boringhieri in 2025 and 2026.

He currently coordinates the Italian national network for combating hate speech and phenomena (www.retecontrolodio.org), of which he has been one of the founders, and holds a consultancy position with the Council of Europe. He is one of the appointed members of the Committee of experts in preventing and combating hate speech and co-authored the Study on preventing and combating hate speech in times of crisis (https://rm.coe.int/-study-on-preventing-and-combating-hate-speech-in-times-of-crisis/1680ad393b).