In the past two years, Sarajevo Open Centre has organized individual trainings, and participated in the program of permanent education for police officers in the community in order to educate them on hate crimes issues, in cooperation with the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Sarajevo Canton.

As a part of two-year project Fighting Hate Crime in BiH, Sarajevo Open Centre will, in the name of Coalition for Combat Against Hate Speech and Hate Crime and in partnership with OSCE Mission in BiH implement trainings on bias motivated crimes and prejudice as a motive of these crimes with financial support of the Permanent Representation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the OSCE in Vienna.

The first in a series of training sessions will be held for police officers of Zeničko-Dobojski Canton, on March 25, 2015, in Zenica. After the ZE-DO Canton, trainings will be implemented in other cantons: Srednjobosanski, Unsko-sanski, Hercegovačko-neretvanski,andTuzlanski Canton. During this year there, trainings for police officers will be organized in other cantons as well.

During the education, police officers will be able to learn more about the concept, domestic legal framework and international standards relating to this type of crimes and relevant examples from practice. Since the incidents and bias motivated crimes are powerful destabilizing factor in every society, and their victims are often the most vulnerable members of marginalized groups, adequate response by competent institutions is the strongest signal to the perpetrators, victims and the community that such conduct will not be tolerated.

We believe that these trainings will contribute to improving the work of the police authorities to shed light on these crimes, but also sensitize them to the problems derived from incidents and bias motivated crimes, and the needs to fully protect the human rights, especially those of vulnerable groups in BiH.