European Society of Criminology's 20th anniversary edition

The two SPECTRA researchers – who are at the same time founding members of the ESC Working Group on Hate Crimes – organized two panels. They directly contributed to the first panel examining the correlation between bias crimes and pandemic politics. Petra Bárd analysed the phenomena of victim blaming, hate speech and the proliferation of hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a special attention to specific groups of victims. In addition to a detailed analysis of the social and economic situation of the Roma in Hungary, Erik Uszkiewicz summarized the social and security tensions between Roma and non-Roma groups during the pandemic. Petra Bárd chaired the second hate crime panel, covering bias motivation, extremism, and terrorism.

The event provided an excellent opportunity for the SPECTRA research group for another international appearance and to disseminate the preliminary results of the ongoing international legal comparison.