In the period 29-30 September 2014, the Train-the-Trainer Workshop – Working with Hate Crime was organised in Prague by the NGO Iustitia from the Czech Republic, as part of the project Hate Crime Prevention in Central and Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans, supported by the International Visegrad Fund. Besides Praxis representatives, Ivana Stjelja and Kristina Vujic, the event was attended by representatives of other partner organisations from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.

The aim of the workshop was to strengthen the partner organisations that will continue to organise local workshops on hate crime for civil society organisations. The workshop was conducted by Dorett Jones and Patricia Ng from the London-based organisation Imkaan. This organisation, in addition to dealing with hate crime against women and girls, is also a world-unique network that links the organisations headed by black women and women from other ethnic minorities and whose work is aimed at preventing violence against women and girls.

The workshop addressed the issues concerning the notion of hate crimes, especially the psychological aspect and work with victims, as well as training skills, all through a combination of presentations, workshops, exchange of experiences and tasks. The main topics were:

• Definition and scope of hate crimes in the participating countries; similarities and differences, causes;
• Identity, relationship of the privileges and responsibilities of the majority population that is usually unaware of its own benefits; facing with own identity; techniques that can be used for training on this topic;
• Challenging situations and dilemmas in training courses, in particular the ways of working with victims and intolerant participants;
• Planning activities related to training on hate crimes;
• Advantages and disadvantages of different ways of conducting training; logistics.

Let us be reminded that hate crime was introduced in the Serbian Criminal Code (Article 54a) in December 2013, as an aggravating circumstance in cases where a criminal offence is committed out of hatred because of race and religion, national or ethnic origin, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity of another person. Regardless of the obvious increase in violence, it has not been applied in practice to date.