The Statelessness Index assesses how countries in Europe protect stateless people and what they are doing to prevent and reduce statelessness. The Statelessness Index was designed and is actively maintained by the European Network on Statelessness (ENS). Latvian Centre for Human Rights is a country expert for Latvia.
Although the overall removal rate of 70,6 % turned out to be only slightly lower compared to the last monitoring (-1,1 percentage points), this result is mostly owed to Facebook’s consistently high removal rate of 84,5% (+0,9 percentage points) and Instagram’s improvement to 77,2% (+6,6 percentage points). Twitter’s performance remained low at 44,9% (+1,4 percentage points), and YouTube only removed 67,8% of illegal hate content, a major drop of 17,6 percent points compared to its last checked performance.
From March to October 2017, Latvian Centre for Human Rights in cooperation with experts from Participation Platform organised 10 training seminars for young people and one training seminar for teachers on intolerance and hate speech. The trainings were organised in the framework of a project “Say NO to hate speech” co-funded by the Education, Culture and Sports Department of the Riga City Council in the framework of the Society integration programme.
September and October 2016, Latvian Centre for Human Rights (LCHR) conducted a survey of foreign students and migrants on manifestations of intolerance (hate speech, hate crimes, etc.) in Latvia. For that purpose, NGOs working with migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, and their representatives were interviewed, and an anonymous online survey was conducted among foreign students in Latvia.
The Latvian Centre for Human Rights in cooperation with the Education, Culture and Sports Department of the Riga City Council launched four-days training for civil servants “Migration, Development and Human Rights.” The training is implemented within the Project “AMITIE CODE – Awareness on MIgration, developmenT and human rIghts through local partnership – Capitalizing On DEvelopment”. Similar trainings to be organised also in other project partners ‘countries – Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Portugal.