Hate Speech and Constitutional Democracy in Eastern Europe: Transitional and Militant? (Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland)

Abstract

This article departs from the normative assumptions about the status of militant democracy in transitional countries, while drawing on the constitutional appraisal of free speech and non-discrimination in Central and Eastern Europe during the period 1990–2012. It explores two models (‘American’ and ‘European’) of legal engagement with hate speech, targeting this recurrent constitutional theme to trace the militant in the transitional discourse on freedom of expression. The study scrutinises the legislative framework and the adjudication of the higher courts (constitutional, supreme and appellate courts) in three selected countries of Central and Eastern Europe – the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland – in an effort to address the dearth of literature in the English language on hate speech laws and policies in these jurisdictions. The author concludes that the discourse on transitional democracy in this post-communist constitutionalism has been substantially constructed as a form of militant democracy, despite some visible influence of the American free speech narrative.

To BAN or not to BAN: Bayesian Attention Networks for Reliable Hate Speech Detection

“…For each of those three target groups substantial research regarding how to stop the hate speech was done. Works by [4,58] define and propose law medications racist hate speech, in the research done by [1,6] national hate speech was investigated and the abuse based on the sexual orientation was explored by [2,24]. As our interest are also the less represented European languages our focus in this paper was on those three target groups.…”

“…On the other hand, falsely accusing people of hate speech is also a problem. Many content providers rely on human moderators to reliably decide if a given context is offensive or not but this is a mundane and stressful job which can even cause post-traumatic stress disorders 1 . There are many attempts to automate detection of hate speech in the social media using machine learning, but existing models lack quantification of reliability for their decisions.…”