A new initiative to fight hate crime launched Monday evening at the Google offices in Brussels, the fruit of a collaboration between Jewish NGO CEJI, the European Commission and social media giants Twitter and Facebook.

“Who could better represent the diversity of Europe, than a Jewish organization born out of the sheer endless plurality of Jewish culture and awareness of embracing differences while still adhering eventually to one big understanding of mutual respect?” said the Coordinator on Antisemitism of the European Commission, Katharina von Schnurbein. She was standing in for the First Vice President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, who had to cancel his participation at the last minute due to sickness.

“With the very unique Jewish European experience with regard to inclusion and being confronted with prejudice and hatred, CEJI is well placed to share this wide knowledge with schools, law enforcement authorities, other NGOs and also with us, the European Commission,” von Schurbein said.

The event saw the beginning of a new project called Facing all the Facts, funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Program of the EC, and coordinated by CEJI.

Noting a correlation between hateful discourse online and actual hate crime – including harassment, vandalism and violence – the initiative seeks to help law-enforcement professionals and civil-society organizations better monitor and counter hate speech.

“We started the Facing Facts initiative back in 2009 to train civil society organizations how to monitor hate crime. Evidence was needed to convince governments to fulfill their obligations," explained Robin Sclafani, Director of CEJI. "Now we all understand that we must work together, police, prosecutors and NGOs, to tackle hate crime and hate speech targeting nationality, ethnicity, religion, the LGBTQ community, disabled people and all other victims of bias-motivated incidents.”

"Hatred corrodes the foundations on which our democratic societies are built,” Timmermans said in a statement ahead of the event. ”We need to make sure that we can debate each other and live together even when we disagree, instead of treating each other as enemies."

Law enforcement agencies from the UK, Italy and Hungary attended the launch, along with representatives from the EC, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Open Society Foundations and numerous civil-society organizations that are stakeholders and collaborators in the initiative.

“At Google, we take this issue very seriously and are particularly troubled by violence and hatred in the world, especially by recent acts of terrorism and violent extremism here in Brussels, Paris and elsewhere,” Lie Junius, Director of EU Public Policy and Government Relations at Google, told the audience. “We want to be part of the solution and to work regularly with NGOs and governments to draw on their expertise so that we can better understand these issues and support innovative solutions.”

She stressed that while empowering people worldwide to create, broadcast and share is at the core of Google’s mission, that freedom is not absolute. In 2015, she said, the company removed 92 million videos for violating guidelines on YouTube. A commitment to vigilantly remove such content is one of the obligations Google has vowed to uphold in its role in the fight against hate speech.

Facing all the Facts is set to run until the end of 2018, and will establish new e-learning modules for police, prosecutors and policy makers on hate crime and hate speech. These modules will become part of the e-learning platform called Facing Facts Online which is also launching the first e-learning course on hate crime monitoring for civil-society organizations.

By TAMARA ZIEVE