Urgent legal solutions needed: Radicals use the internet to spread hatred, collect money

The criminal offense of inciting national, religious, and racial hatred, discord, and intolerance in Bosnia and Herzegovina decreased by 47 percent last year compared to 2013, but this year, 2015, according to the first preliminary statistics, unfortunately, shows a worrying increase in this criminal offense, writes the Patria News Agency.

Tomorrow, parliamentarians in the House of Representatives of the BiH Parliamentary Assembly will consider the Report on the Security Situation in BiH for 2014, and this item on religious and racial hatred is also specifically incorporated into the document that the deputies received.

The Intelligence-Security Agency (OSA) registered a certain number of acts of violence against members of certain religious, national, or other groups or their property, facilities, and symbols throughout BiH in 2014, as well as other incidents that negatively affected inter-ethnic relations and the general security situation at some local levels (destruction, damage, and looting of religious buildings, tombstones, monuments, and symbols of all confessions, activation of explosive devices, and writing and distribution of provocative, offensive, and threatening messages and extremely radical viewpoints).

OSA also learned that provocative and destructive activities by a number of fan groups and their associated far-right organizations and movements, known for their extremely radical, even neo-fascist and neo-Nazi outbursts, have continued, mainly at sports and other public events across BiH.

Radical groups very skillfully use modern information technology to promote their views, through which they also send threatening messages.

- They most often use modern technologies for mutual communication, then for spreading, indoctrinating, and distributing extremely radical views and ideology, for collecting and exchanging data, for collecting funds, recruitment, mobilization, and for networking - the report states.

Chat and Facebook pages on some portals, where communication is fundamentally intolerant and exclusive on a national, religious, and political basis, are particularly attractive to them.

- Police officers need more training in the area of cybercrime, and adequate legal solutions should also be initiated in the area of regulating various internet portals - it is further stated.