Centro de Documentação da PJ
Analítico de Periódico
CD 341
How we hate in court [Recurso eletrónico] : an overview of psychological, legal and judicial perspectives on hate crimes under Portuguese law / Nuno Igreja Matos
Anatomia do Crime, Lisboa, N.º 19 (Janeiro-Junho 2024), p. 221-250
Ficheiro de 344 KB em formato PDF.
CRIME POR ÓDIO, DIREITO PENAL, DISCRIMINAÇÃO RACIAL, JURISPRUDÊNCIA, PORTUGAL
Hate is difficult to grasp. For a long time, moral and ethical philosophy, as well as psychological studies have tried to outline hate as an internal experience of the self that could take the form of an emotion, a sentiment, and/or an attitude. The personal experience of hate, however, remains largely inaccessible. Notwithstanding the difficulty in assessing what it is and where it can be located, hate nevertheless entered the modern legal systems, being used nowadays as a concept relating to the international fight against discrimination. Its subsequent evolution from an idea enshrined in broad international conventions to a criminal law concept had two effects: first, it carried the debate about its meaning to the criminal realm, where scholars face similar difficulties in assessing what is hate; second, it gave rise to new dogmatic difficulties concerning the best legal method to isolate and value hate. Following a brief analysis to the psychological and to the criminal law debates, the present text looks at three decisions from the Portuguese criminal courts relating to hate crimes. Based on the analysis of the cases, an attempt is here laid out to isolate a pattern on the judicial approach to hate considering the previous definitions gathered from the non-legal and legal studies on hate, in order to establish if there is a continuity or a disconnection between the mentioned scientific views and the Portuguese criminal courts standpoint.
