35 Spring-Summer 2017 For Efficient Rule of Law, Response of the Legal System Should Be Adapted to Socio-Political Circumstances Croatia's accession to the European Union gave new wind to the combat against hate speech. The alignment of Croatian legislation with the acquis communautaire resulted in the adoption of higher legal standards in the field of human rights protection, and hate speech was for the first time incorporated in Croatian legislation as a criminal offense. However, in contrast to detailed legislation, there is almost no case-law regarding hate speech. In order to answer the questions asked in the introduction regarding the adequacy of legislation and its enforcement, it is required to discern what its regulatory significance is, its expected and actual efficiency, and what measures should be employed to adequately respond to current issues. Law is a system that regulates human behavior. Human behavior governed by legal rules can refer to positive acts, but also to failing to act. As a system of legal and social organization, law regulates individual behavior to the extent that it relates to other individuals. In doing so, those relations can be individual or collective. Legal norms give individual actions the character of legal acts. The word "norm" denotes a thought that something should be done or shouldn’t be done, especially when an individual needs to define his behavior in a certain way. The legal importance of the norm and the system of norms lies in expressing the desired behavior and incriminating the opposite behavior as harmful, both socially and individually. The behavior that conforms to the norm is the one in line with the desired behavior, explicitly or implicitly contained in the norm.23 When a particular legal rule prescribes a particular human behavior, it does so because it is considered valuable and important for the community of people to which it relates. That behavior is deemed significant and valuable not only because its definition protects a right of some other person, but especially because such a definition protects the economic, social or other legal interest of the community as a whole.24 The legal system acts as a coercive order, meaning that it is a system that uses coercive measures to respond to behaviors that are deemed undesirable and harmful for the community and its individual members.25 Those coercive measures are sanctions which are applied when the assumptions for their application are met, used by a legal system to protect individuals and community against the arbitrary use of force and violence, both by the system and by individuals and groups in the society. When this protection has reached a certain minimum, we speak of collective security. The aim of collective security is peace, defined as the absence of coercion and violence. By applying this conceptual framework to Croatian legislation and practice, we come to the following conclusions: The normative significance of legislation and practice is mirrored in incriminating behaviors expressing and inciting to violence and disturbance of public order and peace. The behavior concerned is identified as socially harmful and undesirable and, as such, is subject to misdemeanor or criminal sanctions. In order to sanction, prevent and encourage individuals to accept behavior that does not in itself contain hatred, violence and disturbance of the public order and peace, the legal system resorts to the means of coercion, i.e. different forms of sanctions. For less severe offenses, coercion is expressed in material form through fines, while for more severe offenses coercion may also be physical in the form of imprisonment. When it comes to legislation, the severity of sanctions prescribed by the legal system demonstrates a serious approach to the issue of hatred and violence. However, regarding enforcement, the system treats the incriminated behavior relatively mildly, and in most cases it fails even to react, which gives the impression of an easy-going approach to the problem. This can be understood as a likely explanation of functioning in stable socio-political conditions, when a majority of committed offenses are of lesser severity and when perpetrators are a few insignificant individuals with deviant behavior. However, the question is whether this is still justified and sustainable if the number and intensity of incidents significantly increase, and hatred is systematically organized and promoted. In that case, does the lack of intensity of the system's response jeopardize its efficiency? Does the legal system stray from its purpose if it fails to adjust its response to circumstances in which violence is becoming an everyday occurrence and the number of people resorting to violence is constantly growing? At present, both in Croatia and in its immediate international environment, we are witnessing an escalation of extremism and hatred, and the resulting crimes committed under the influence of hatred, sometimes of unthinkable proportions. The psychology of fundamentalism-related crimes today that we call terrorism is, in fact, hatred. And hatred, which is at the heart of 23. Hans Kelsen, THEORIE PURE DU DROIT (1999), at 17. 24. Id. at 39. 25. Id. at 41.
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