The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) has issued another set of polite bureaucratic thunderbolts, this time aimed at Ireland and Finland, for not cracking down hard enough on their citizens’ conversations.
The group, operating under the Council of Europe, says both nations have been dragging their feet on what it calls “hate speech.”
In other words, they’re not censoring fast enough.
In Ireland’s case, ECRI was appalled to discover that the country’s “extremely limited” legal framework still leaves some room for public disagreement online.
The commission noted with concern that certain hate speech provisions were removed from the Criminal Justice (Hate Offences) Act 2024, and urged Dublin to correct the oversight by writing new laws to target such expression.
The report didn’t stop there. It called for a national data system to document “racist and LGBTI-phobic bullying and violence in schools” and a “comprehensive data collection” program for hate crimes and hate speech.
It even floated the idea of regulating “election-related misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy,” which it deemed “critical to limit the spread of hateful ideas.”
So the plan is clear: build a bureaucracy that tracks words, ideas, and schoolyard insults, then hand election discourse over to regulatory authorities. What could go wrong?
ECRI did find time to congratulate Ireland for its National Action Plan Against Racism and inclusion programs for Roma and Traveller communities.
But after that brief applause, the hammer came back down. Hate speech, it concluded, remains “widespread.” More laws, more oversight, more policing of conversation.
Finland’s report read like a blueprint for speech management. ECRI announced that hate speech there “has increased and reached a critical level,” though it didn’t specify what exactly counts as hate speech, or how “critical” was measured.
The group praised Finnish police for maintaining “a regular presence in a web-based gaming platform” where officers act as “game police” and talk to young users about hate speech and online crime. It’s not satire, that’s in the official report.
ECRI proposed creating a national working group to design new policies against hate speech and advised police to unify their methods for “recognition, unmasking and official recording” of hate.
Schools, it said, should install systems to track “racist and LGBTI-phobic incidents,” while even non-criminal “hate incidents” should be formally recognized and logged.
The subtext is obvious: the line between combating hatred and policing speech grows thinner each year. ECRI insists that democracy is strengthened when governments monitor what people say.
Europe’s challenge will be deciding how much democracy it can stand.
