Members of Parliament from two Dutch political parties of GroenLinks and ChristenUnie have submitted a Private Member’s bill that would allow the punishment for crimes to be more severe when the motive is discriminatory.
Members of Parliament from the Dutch political parties of GroenLinks and ChristenUnie have submitted a Private Member’s bill to the Tweede Kamer that would allow the punishment for crimes to be more severe when the motive is discriminatory. If passed, anyone convicted of a hate crime could see their sentence increased by a third, reports the NL Times.
Both parties have been working on the proposal since 2018, and the currently submitted bill was developed after the first attack on the kosher restaurant HaCarmel in Amsterdam in 2020.
The MP politicians of the parties want hate crimes to be punished more severely because these crimes “have major consequences not only for the direct victims, but for the entire group addressed by them. Hate crimes thus pose a threat to society as a whole.”
Both MPs claim that research has shows that in the Netherlands, a hate crime is often punished “as if it is an ‘ordinary’ act of destruction or ‘ordinary’ assault,” and since the discrimination aspect is not often mentioned, victims report these crimes less frequently.
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