Granice mowy nienawiści – prawo a rzeczywistość
The boundaries of hate speech: law and reality

Summary/Abstract: The reasons for exploring hate speech in this article were: the significance of this categoryin the Polish public discourse in the second decade of the 21st century; lack of consensus asto what phenomenon it falls within the scope of this category; a need for a legal, statutorydefinition of this term. The main aims of the article were to capture the moment whenthe meaning of the notion of hate speech broadened, to discover factors determining thisbroadening, and to assess the validity of a postulate to make hate speech a legal term.To realize the research objectives a selection of texts representing anti-discriminationdiscourse was analysed as the greatest impact on the broadening of the meaning of hatespeech is wielded by entities involved in the protection of minority rights (in particularthe rights of sexual minorities). The characteristics of this non-legal understandingof hate speech are listed, taking into account a linguistic, a sociological and a psychologicalperspective. The article distinguishes the characteristics of hate speech that – accordingto the entities involved in the defence of minority rights – are decisive for the inclusionof homophobic discourse within the scope of hate speech. It also discusses those featuresthat are decisive for the identification of cases of hate speech in the field of symbolicviolence, caused by contempt or hatred. Taking into account the fact that broadeningthe non-legal understanding of hate speech does not have to imply penalizing allits manifestations, and allowing for diverse interferences between the legal and thenon-legal understanding of hate speech, the postulate of turning this concept into a legalterm was found unjustified. It was also shown that when there is a balance between beinga minority and being a sufficiently large/visible minority, broadly understood hate speechis taken into account in the legislative reality.

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