International Project Cooperation

Enhancing Stakeholder Awareness and Resources for Hate Crime Victim Support (EStAR)

Duration: 01.01.2020 – 30.04.2022

Implementing Organizations:

Project Countries: 27 EU Member States and Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iceland, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

By implementing the EStAR project, we reaffirm our commitment to providing support to hate crime victims, advocating for a victim-centered approach and improving services to those who suffered a hate motivated discrimination, abuse and violence.

Through the project, and together with our partner, ODIHR, we will set up the first ever Expert Network of victim support practitioners who work to ensure that hate crime victims receive adequate protection, specialized services and access to justice.

We will build on experts’ knowledge and experience to continue promoting and developing good practices in hate crime victim support and encourage cooperation between state actors and Civil Society Organizations. We will do so by engaging our Network partners in producing analytical papers on needs of hate crime victims, baseline studies on structural frameworks for individual needs assessment and referrals, compendiums on cooperation models between government agencies and civil society actors, as well as providing an assessment of availability and quality of specialized services. We will offer innovative ways to identify gaps in national hate crime victim support and present options to address shortcomings.

The project is implemented at a challenging time when the entire world is dealing with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We will look for ways to deploy our resources using positive potential of digital tools to ensure that the project is carried out in an inclusive and collaborative manner, with all relevant stakeholders having access to a platform to exchange information and jointly work on ways to improve support for hate crime victims.

We are painfully aware of the rise in hate crimes since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, and commit ourselves to intensify our efforts to ensure protection and support to victims of hate crimes, strengthen cooperation between countries and among service providers to ensure that victims have access to justice, necessary psychological, social and legal support.