Facing Facts

Facing Facts is an innovative programme and network aiming to tackle the issue of hate crime and hate speech in Europe. Since its inception in 2011, this community of practice has been praised for its role in training on, and advocating for, hate crime monitoring systems that expose overlooked hate motivated acts.

Facing Facts began as a partnership between four NGOs, with complementary experience in education, advocacy and hate crime monitoring to develop the first ‘train the trainer’ programme on monitoring hate crimes for Civil Society Organisations. Moving forward, Facing Facts has evolved into a broad European network of civil society organisations and law enforcement agencies that generates holistic, multi-stakeholder approaches to hate crime monitoring, response and prevention.

Due to increasing demand for capacity building programmes in this field by EU Member States, the Facing Facts training offer is now available online (www.facingfactsonline.eu) and is used by law enforcement and civil society representatives. Multiple courses in multiple languages address specific aspects of identifying, monitoring and countering hate crime and hate speech.

Building cooperation amongst the stakeholders at national level is an important part of the Facing all the Facts project. Through a participatory action-research methodology, hate crime recording stakeholders across the national system have been brought together to:

co-describe the current situation(what data do we have right now? where is hate crime happening? to whom?)
co-diagnose gaps and issues (where are the gaps? who is least protected? what needs to be done?), and;
co-prioritise actions for improvement (what are the most important things that need to be done now and in the future?).

The results of the work done thus far in 6 countries and a European Report with its various component resources are available under Research.

The specific bias indicators courses on Facing Facts Online courses have been developed and implemented within the framework of the Facing all the Facts project, which ran for 3 years from 2016-2019 (JUST/2015/RRAC/AG/TRAI/8997) while the online hate speech course, now also available in Italian, was adapted to French and German within the sCAN project. The multiplicity of outputs will be sustained through the years to come.

The Facing Facts initiative is coordinated by CEJI-A Jewish contribution to an inclusive Europe

Contact