Indicator history

According to the Polish Criminal Code, the court is invited to take into account the racist motive of an offence as part of specific penalisation guidelines set out in one of the articles of the Criminal Code. The guidelines point to the motive of action or inaction of the perpetrator as one of the circumstances affecting the scope of the penalty. They do not contain a list exhaustive or indicative of factors that could amount to aggravating circumstances. It means that Polish law does not render expressly the racial motivation of an offence as an aggravating circumstance which however influences the qualification of an offence. It is not possible to state how often it is applied by courts in the cases of hate crimes and how the judges follow the sentencing recommendation in the case of crimes related to someone’s origin.