Romania

The problem of hateful expression in Romania is a recurrent one and is based on deep-seated prejudices of the Romanian society. Those prejudices are reflected in the discrepancy between the ‘legal’ realm – composed of the applicable national laws and international treaties – and the ‘real’ realm – which is made up of numerous incidents amounting to hate speech and the passive reaction of the Romanian authorities when confronted with them. Thus, the report on Romania aims at highlighting the fact that simply adopting laws and ratifying international treaties is useless in the absence of a change of mindset towards truly believing in the equality of all people.