FIXING THE LAW
Harmonizing the Offenses
A Missing Offense
Not only do the existing offenses not work well with one another, an important component is missing from this body of law.
Currently, the only kind of hate speech that is criminalized when uttered during the commission of atrocities is persecution as a crime against humanity. But not only is this limited to crimes against humanity (CAH), it also imposes the burdensome CAH requirements, such as proving that the speaker was targeting the victim group based on its protected characteristic (i.e., race, religion, ethnicity).
Thus, in order to cover speech uttered contemporaneously with the commission of atrocities that is not saddled with the specific CAH requirements, we propose a new offense called “speech abetting”. This new modality represents a kind of “egging on” speech that would be committed when:
Harmonizing the Offenses: The Unified Liability Theory
In order to make all the offenses fit together and work well with one another, we need to identify two factors:
Unified liability theory of Atrocity Speech Law
Based on these two factors, we can link all the offenses together through what we would call the “Unified Liability Theory”, which would allow for all speech offense categories to apply to any core crime
Operationalizing the Theory: Putting the New Framework into Practice
