Maria Rasmussen receives funding from the Foundation for Legal Research
Maria Rasmussen has been awarded postdoctoral funding from the Foundation for Legal Research (Stiftelsen för rättsvetenskaplig forskning) for the project Hate crimes in Swedish criminal law – characteristics, criteria and criticism. Maria is a senior lecturer in criminal law at the Department of Law at Uppsala University.
Maria Rasmussen
The term hate crime is in Swedish law often used as a collective term for the offences of agitation against a population group and unlawful discrimination, as well as the provision on hate crime motive as an aggravating circumstance. What these provisions have in common is that they can only be applied in relation to certain specific characteristics, such as ethnicity and sexual orientation. Several changes have been made to the various provisions in recent years, and it is likely that further changes can be expected in the future, not least due to EU legal initiatives. The latest change came into force on 1 July 2025, when gender was included in the provision on hate crime motive as an aggravating circumstance.
The project will analyse the three hate crime provisions together. Such an analysis can be expected to yield synergies in relation to the individual provisions, but also to contribute conclusions about the function and meaning of hate crime as an umbrella concept. In international academic literature, there is a lively debate about how hate crime legislation should be formulated, but also criticism of its premises. Against this background, the aim of the project is to place hate crimes in a more political-theoretical context and to examine the alternatives that have been formulated to legislation based on specific groups.
The project will commence in 2026 and run for two years.