Countries with the Most Hate Crimes (2025 Ranked)

Hate crimes — criminal acts motivated by bias against a victim's race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, or other protected characteristic — are among the most politically significant and statistically unreliable crimes in global databases. The numbers that appear in official tables tell you more about the infrastructure and culture of a country's criminal justice system than about the underlying reality of hate-motivated violence. A country with 145,000 reported hate crimes per year may be more progressive, not more prejudiced, than one reporting 500. Understanding what these numbers actually measure — and what they conceal — is necessary before the rankings mean anything.

Methodology: why hate crime data is uniquely problematic

No other major crime category suffers from as many simultaneous measurement problems as hate crime. Every number in the table below carries more caveats than a financial prospectus.

The definition problem: Countries define hate crime differently, and the differences are large enough to make direct comparison mathematically meaningless without adjustment. The United States defines a hate crime as an offence "motivated in whole or in part" by the offender's bias — a standard requiring evidence of perpetrator intent. The United Kingdom includes any offence that the victim, or anyone else, perceives to be motivated by hostility toward a protected characteristic — a victim-perception standard that captures far more incidents than an intent standard. Germany's Politisch motivierte Kriminalität (PMK) framework covers any crime with a political motivation, a substantially broader category than hate crime in the US sense. Sweden, France, Finland, Austria, and Canada all use different standards.

The reporting paradox: Countries with better-designed hate crime reporting systems collect more reports. This creates a deeply counterintuitive outcome: Sweden's comparatively high per-capita hate crime rate partly reflects an explicit policy investment in making hate crime reporting accessible, credible, and victim-friendly. The UK's 145,000+ annual hate crime reports reflect the UK's victim-perception standard, dedicated hate crime police units, community liaison officers, and reporting portals developed specifically to lower barriers for minority communities. These countries do not necessarily have more hate crime than countries with almost no reported incidents — they have better measurement.

The police classification gap: Even when victims report incidents to police, officers must classify them as hate crimes — a discretionary judgment that varies by officer, department, and legal culture. Studies in the United States have found that police misclassification rates are high: incidents meeting the legal definition of hate crime are frequently coded as ordinary assault, criminal mischief, or disorderly conduct. Departments with dedicated hate crime units and trained officers classify more incidents correctly.

Victim underreporting: Survey data consistently shows that reported hate crimes represent a small fraction of actual incidents. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey estimates actual hate crime victimisation at approximately 250,000 incidents per year — roughly 20 times the FBI-reported figure. Victims underreport because they doubt police will act, fear secondary victimisation from officers, lack legal status (particularly immigrant victims), don't recognise incidents as hate crimes, or belong to communities with low institutional trust.

The OSCE ODIHR framework: The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) collects hate crime data from all 57 OSCE participating states annually. Its database is the most comprehensive comparative international source but is explicit about non-comparability: figures are published with detailed notes on definition, coverage, and collection methodology differences. The ODIHR also separately tracks civil society reported hate crimes, which often exceed official figures substantially.

Source: OSCE ODIHR Hate Crime Reporting, hatecrime.osce.org; Bureau of Justice Statistics, Hate Crime Victimization, 2004–2020 (NCJ 301058); European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), Being Black in the EU (2023).

Countries with the most reported hate crimes

(Official hate crime or bias crime reports, most recent available data)

Rank	Country	Annual reports	Per 100K pop	Primary categories
1	United States	11,643 (FBI 2022)	3.5	Race (55%), religion (19%), sexual orientation (17%)
2	Germany	40,000+ PMK	48	Far-right dominant; antisemitism, xenophobia
3	United Kingdom	145,000+	215	Race (70%), religion, sexual orientation
4	Canada	3,500	9	Race, religion, sexual orientation
5	France	8,000+	12	Antisemitism, racism, anti-Muslim
6	Sweden	8,800	85	Race, religion, sexual orientation
7	Netherlands	5,500	32	Race, religion
8	Austria	1,500	17	Far-right; antisemitism
9	Finland	1,200	22	Ethnicity, religion
10	Australia	5,000+	19	Race, religion, sexuality

These figures are not directly comparable. Different definitions, collection methods, reporting cultures, and legal frameworks produce numbers that reflect systems as much as incidents.

Source: OSCE ODIHR Hate Crime Reporting database (2022), FBI Uniform Crime Reports, UK Home Office Crime Survey (2022/23), German BKA Politisch motivierte Kriminalität reports.

Where this data comes from

Hate crime figures in this ranking are drawn from three primary sources: the OSCE ODIHR's International Hate Crime Reporting database (the most comprehensive comparative source across 57 participating states), official police and law enforcement agencies in individual countries (FBI for the US, BKA for Germany, College of Policing for the UK), and occasional civil society tracking when official figures are unreliable or absent. The 2022–2023 data represents the most recent available for most countries. However, a critical caveat: these numbers reflect the infrastructure of hate crime recording, not the uniform underlying reality. Countries with dedicated hate crime units, victim-centred reporting policies, and low barriers to reporting generate higher apparent rates than countries with weak recording systems. A high number in this table suggests both genuine incidents and institutional capacity to measure them — making international comparisons hazardous without understanding each country's methodological framework.

Historical context: how hate crime became a legal and statistical category

The framing of bias-motivated crime as a distinct category requiring separate tracking and enhanced penalties is historically recent — and contested.

Pre-legal history: Violence targeting people because of racial, religious, or ethnic identity has existed throughout recorded history. The lynching of Black Americans in the post-Reconstruction South (approximately 4,000 documented lynchings between 1877 and 1950), the pogroms against Jewish communities in Tsarist Russia and Eastern Europe, the violence against Asian immigrants in the 19th-century American West — all were hate crimes in substance before the category existed in law.

The US Hate Crime Statistics Act (1990): The United States was the first country to establish a national hate crime data collection mandate. The Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 required the FBI to collect data on crimes "that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity." This created the first systematic national database and the framework for the FBI Uniform Crime Reports hate crime tables that remain the primary US data source. The initial mandate was narrow; it has been expanded several times, most significantly to include disability and gender identity.

The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009): The murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student beaten and left to die in 1998, and of James Byrd Jr., a Black man dragged behind a pickup truck in Texas in 1998, galvanised US federal hate crime legislation. The 2009 Act expanded federal jurisdiction for hate crimes to include sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability, and gave the federal government authority to prosecute cases where local law enforcement failed to act.

The European framework: The Council of Europe's Framework Decision on Combating Racism and Xenophobia (2008) required EU member states to criminalise public incitement to violence or hatred based on race, colour, religion, descent, or national or ethnic origin. Implementation has been uneven — definitions, prosecutorial standards, and enforcement vary dramatically across the EU.

The OSCE commitment: All 57 OSCE participating states committed to collecting and publishing hate crime data through a series of declarations beginning in 2003. The ODIHR hate crime reporting database was established to implement this. As of 2023, fewer than half of participating states provide police data that fully meets ODIHR reporting standards — progress has been real but incomplete.

Source: FBI, Hate Crime Statistics Act Annual Reports; US Department of Justice, Summary of Hate Crime Statistics; Council of Europe, Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA.

The United States: the FBI database and its gaps

The US has the world's longest-running standardised hate crime tracking system — and its problems illustrate challenges that other countries face in less documented form.

The racial breakdown: In 2022, race, ethnicity, and ancestry motivated approximately 55% of FBI-reported hate crimes. Religion accounted for approximately 19% (with antisemitism consistently the largest subcategory — roughly 55% of religion-based hate crimes). Sexual orientation accounted for approximately 15%; gender identity approximately 3%. The distribution has been broadly stable over many years, though relative shares shift with specific incidents or campaigns.

Anti-Black hate crime as the dominant category: Anti-Black hate crimes consistently represent the largest single category in US hate crime statistics — approximately 25–30% of all hate crimes reported. The rate spiked significantly during 2020–2021, a period of heightened racial tension following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. Researchers note that heightened reporting during periods of social tension may reflect both increased incidents and increased willingness to report.

The anti-Asian surge (2020–2021): The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a documented increase in anti-Asian hate crimes driven partly by political rhetoric associating the pandemic with China. FBI data showed anti-Asian hate crimes up over 300% in major US cities between 2019 and 2021. The Stop AAPI Hate reporting organisation — which accepts self-reports directly from victims — documented over 10,000 incidents in its first year of operation (2020–2021), far exceeding FBI-reported figures for the same period. This gap illustrates the divergence between official police-recorded data and incident-level reality.

The participation gap: A persistent structural problem in the FBI hate crime database is that reporting is voluntary for local law enforcement agencies. In 2022, approximately 70% of law enforcement agencies submitted hate crime reports. Of those reporting agencies, 87% reported zero hate crimes — a figure that does not plausibly reflect reality for medium-to-large cities or agencies. In some high-population states, entire state reporting systems went dark for periods because of data platform transitions. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting transition to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) has created significant year-over-year comparability issues in 2021–2022.

The antisemitism dimension: The United States records more antisemitic hate crimes than any other country outside active conflict zones. The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks antisemitic incidents independently of police data, recorded 3,697 antisemitic incidents in 2022 — the highest level since tracking began in 1979. The 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh (11 killed) and the 2019 Poway synagogue attack (1 killed) occurred in a context of documented rising antisemitism measurable in both police data and independent tracking.

Source: FBI, Hate Crime Statistics 2022; Stop AAPI Hate National Report 2021; Anti-Defamation League, Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2022.

Germany: politically motivated crime and the far-right challenge

Germany's approach to hate-motivated crime is shaped by its specific historical experience with political violence and the ongoing far-right challenge.

The PMK framework explained: Germany's Politisch motivierte Kriminalität system categorises any crime with a political motivation. The four main subcategories — PMK-right, PMK-left, PMK-religious/Islamist, and PMK-ausländisch (foreign national-on-foreign national) — capture a broader range of politically motivated offending than "hate crime" narrowly defined. PMK-right consistently dominates: in 2022, approximately 23,500 of approximately 39,000 total PMK offences were classified as right-wing motivated. Violence — as opposed to propaganda offences, property damage, and intimidation — represents a smaller share.

Antisemitism in Germany — persistent and rising: Germany has among the strongest legal frameworks against antisemitism in the world, including criminal prohibitions on Holocaust denial (Volksverhetzung), Nazi symbol display, and the Hitler salute. Despite this, antisemitic incidents have risen: the BKA (Federal Criminal Police Office) recorded approximately 2,639 antisemitic offences in 2022. The German government appointed a Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life in 2018, acknowledging that legal prohibition alone was insufficient.

The NSU failures and their legacy: The National Socialist Underground (NSU) murders — a neo-Nazi cell that killed 10 people (mostly of Turkish origin, plus 2 police officers) between 2000 and 2007 — were not identified as a single connected hate crime campaign for nearly a decade. Police and intelligence agencies pursued the victims' families as suspects rather than investigating right-wing extremism. The parliamentary investigation committees that followed identified systematic failures: intelligence agencies had informants inside far-right networks who were never used to identify the NSU; files were shredded. The NSU case shaped German hate crime policing and intelligence priorities for a decade and remains a reference point in debates about institutional racism in German law enforcement.

The AfD and political violence context: The rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which has served as a legitimising frame for far-right views, correlates with the rise in PMK-right offences during 2015–2019. The murder of CDU politician Walter Lübcke in 2019 by a right-wing extremist, the Halle synagogue attack (2019, 2 killed), and the Hanau shootings (2020, 9 killed, targeting shisha bars and their predominantly immigrant patrons) represent the violent end of a broader far-right movement that German authorities treat as the country's primary domestic security threat.

Source: Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), Politisch motivierte Kriminalität 2022; Bundesministerium des Innern, PMK annual reports; German Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on the NSU, Final Report (2013).

The UK: the paradox of high reporting and progressive infrastructure

The United Kingdom reports hate crimes at a per-capita rate higher than almost any other country — 215 per 100,000 population versus 3.5 for the United States. This difference is almost entirely a function of recording methodology and reporting infrastructure, not of underlying prejudice levels.

The victim-perception standard: UK hate crime law, operationalised through the College of Policing's Hate Crime Operational Guidance, defines a hate incident as "any non-crime incident which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice." A hate crime is any criminal offence meeting the same perception standard. The operational guidance is explicit: "the victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception." This approach maximises recording and is designed to ensure victims are not disbelieved; it also means incidents that might not be classified as hate crimes in other jurisdictions enter UK statistics.

Race hate dominant — and Brexit's spike: Race hate crimes represent approximately 70% of UK hate crimes — approximately 100,000 incidents annually. The week following the June 2016 Brexit referendum saw a 57% spike in reported hate crimes compared to the equivalent period the prior year, recorded by the National Police Chiefs' Council. Researchers attributed this to both genuine increase in emboldened prejudice-motivated behaviour and increased reporting by communities that perceived themselves newly targeted.

The Online Safety Act and digital hate: The UK has been at the forefront of extending hate crime law to digital communications. Social media posts, text messages, and emails have long been includable in hate crime statistics if they meet the hostility standard. The Online Safety Act (2023) further extended regulatory requirements on platforms to remove hate speech content and imposed new offences for sending "false communications" and "cyberflashing." The UK's inclusion of online hate in crime statistics is another factor explaining its high per-capita rates relative to countries that only count in-person offences.

Police recording critique: Civil liberties organisations and some legal scholars have criticised the UK victim-perception standard as creating a system in which reporting "hate crimes" functions as a speech-restriction mechanism — where offensive but legal speech is recorded by police even if no criminal offence occurred. The debate about whether the UK system is appropriately victim-centred or inappropriately constraining is genuinely contested in UK civil liberties discourse.

Source: College of Policing, Hate Crime Operational Guidance (2014, updated 2020); Home Office, Hate Crime, England and Wales 2022/23; National Police Chiefs' Council Brexit hate crime data.

France and the Mediterranean: antisemitism and anti-Muslim incidents

France has the largest Jewish population in Europe outside of Israel and one of the largest Muslim populations in Western Europe — making it a central site for antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate crime tracking.

Antisemitism in France: The CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France) and the Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (SPCJ) track antisemitic incidents in France independently of police data. SPCJ recorded 436 antisemitic acts in 2022 — down from a peak of 1,597 in 2018 but reflecting an ongoing pattern. Serious acts — physical violence, arson, vandalism of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries — recur at a frequency that France's Jewish community describes as affecting daily life decisions. A significant proportion of antisemitic violence in France has been perpetrated by young men of North African background, a pattern that complicates both political analysis and policy response.

Anti-Muslim incidents: France's Service Central du Renseignement Territorial tracks anti-Muslim acts separately. The pattern of spikes following terrorist attacks is consistent — the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks, and subsequent jihadist attacks, triggered documented rises in anti-Muslim incidents in the following months.

The French institutional context: France's approach to hate crime is shaped by its "republican" model of citizenship — the principle that the state does not recognise ethnic, racial, or religious communities as official categories. This creates tension: France collects some ethnicity-based hate crime data while simultaneously maintaining the legal principle that official statistics should not categorise citizens by race or religion. The result is a patchwork of data — some civil society tracking, some police data, and methodological debates about what can even be measured.

Source: SPCJ, Rapport sur l'Antisémitisme en France 2022; Dilcrah (Délégation Interministérielle à la Lutte contre le Racisme, l'Antisémitisme et la Haine anti-LGBT), annual reports.

Surprises in the data: what the rankings miss

Russia's disappearing hate crime statistics: Russia reported more than 600 hate crime convictions per year in the mid-2000s, following the murder of approximately 48 people in racially motivated attacks in 2004. By 2022, official Russian hate crime figures had fallen to near zero — not because hate crime eliminated itself, but because the Russian government reclassified monitoring priorities, de-emphasised hate crime prosecution, and simultaneously cracked down on the civil society organisations that had been tracking hate crimes independently (most notably the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, which was forced to shut down or relocate due to "foreign agent" designations).

Japan's hate speech law (2016) and data gap: Japan passed its first hate speech law in 2016, covering speech targeting people based on national origin (directed primarily at Korean and Chinese residents). The law has no criminal penalties — it is declaratory, expressing opposition to hate speech without providing enforcement mechanisms. Japan does not have a comprehensive hate crime law or national hate crime statistics. Incidents targeting the Zainichi Korean community, Ainu people, and Burakumin (historically marginalised group) occur and are documented by civil society but are not systematically tracked in official statistics.

Hungary and Poland — legislative exemptions: Both Hungary and Poland have passed legislation that legal scholars and the European Commission have argued effectively exempts certain anti-LGBTQ hate from hate crime prosecution. Hungary's 2021 law restricting discussion of homosexuality in educational materials directed at children, and Poland's local "LGBT-free zones" declarations, represent policy environments in which anti-LGBTQ hate crime may go unreported and, if reported, face hostile reception from prosecutors.

The invisible majority: The ODIHR's 2023 hate crime annual report notes that the majority of OSCE participating states either do not have hate crime laws or do not systematically collect hate crime data. Many African, Asian, and Latin American countries record no hate crime statistics whatsoever — not because hate crime does not occur (it does, extensively) but because the legal and administrative infrastructure to record it does not exist.

Source: OSCE ODIHR, Hate Crime Reporting Annual Data 2022; SOVA Center for Information and Analysis (archived materials); EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), Antisemitism: Overview of Data 2012–2022.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Are hate crimes increasing globally? A: In countries with good tracking systems, reported hate crimes have generally increased over the past decade. Multiple factors are at play: improved reporting mechanisms and victim-centred policing making reports more likely; heightened political polarisation in many democracies; the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement increasing awareness and reporting of anti-Black incidents; COVID-19 triggering documented anti-Asian incidents; and algorithmic social media amplifying extremist content that normalises prejudice. Whether underlying incidents have increased, or reporting has improved, is methodologically difficult to separate — most researchers believe both are happening simultaneously.

Q: What motivates hate crimes? A: Research identifies several reinforcing factors. Economic anxiety and scapegoating — linking outgroup members to economic insecurity — is a consistent predictor across historical periods. Perceived demographic change and cultural threat drive much far-right mobilisation, including in Europe and the United States. Extremist ideologies spread through online communities create shared frameworks that justify violence. Traumatic in-group events — terrorist attacks attributed to a particular group — reliably trigger retaliatory hate crimes against perceived out-group members. The "contact hypothesis" in social psychology suggests that low contact with out-groups predicts higher prejudice; conversely, meaningful intergroup contact under conditions of equal status reduces prejudice.

Q: Are hate crimes prosecuted differently from ordinary crimes? A: In most jurisdictions, hate crime functions as a penalty enhancement rather than a standalone offence. A perpetrator convicted of assault who targeted the victim because of their race will receive a longer sentence than a perpetrator who committed an equivalent assault without bias motivation. This enhancement reflects the judgment that hate crimes cause additional harm — to the direct victim (who experiences the crime as an attack on their identity), to the targeted community (which experiences heightened fear and reduced freedom of movement), and to social cohesion. Prosecution rates remain low relative to reports — most hate crimes that are reported result in no criminal conviction, and hate crime charges are frequently plea-bargained away.

Q: What is the relationship between online hate and hate crime? A: The relationship between online hate speech and offline hate crime is an active area of research, with evidence pointing to a real but complex connection. Studies have found correlations between social media hate speech intensity and subsequent hate crime in specific locations. The Christchurch mosque shootings (2019, 51 killed) were committed by a perpetrator who had been extensively radicalized through online platforms and who livestreamed the attack. German researchers have found correlations between Facebook hate posts about refugees and attacks on refugee shelters at the municipal level. The causal mechanism — whether online hate speech directly causes offline violence, or whether both reflect a shared underlying radicalization trend — is difficult to isolate.

Q: Why do so many US law enforcement agencies report zero hate crimes? A: The FBI hate crime reporting system is voluntary — local law enforcement agencies decide whether to participate and how thoroughly to report. Many small agencies genuinely may have no recordable hate crimes. But the implausibility of zero hate crime reports from medium and large cities and counties points to a combination of non-participation, definitional inconsistency, classification failure (bias-motivated incidents coded as ordinary offences), and institutional culture that does not prioritise hate crime investigation. Studies of specific cities have found that when police departments receive hate crime training, increase community outreach to minority communities, and create dedicated hate crime units, reported hate crimes rise substantially — reflecting improved capture rather than increased incidence.

Q: What is the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, and what does it measure? A: The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) conducts surveys of discrimination and hate crime experiences among minority populations in EU member states. Its methodology is different from police-recorded data: FRA surveys ask respondents directly about their experiences of victimisation regardless of whether they reported to police. FRA surveys of Jewish people in the EU (2018, 2023) and of people of African descent in the EU (2016, 2023) consistently find that experienced discrimination and hate crime substantially exceeds police-recorded rates. FRA data is valuable precisely because it captures the dark figure of unreported victimisation that official statistics miss.

Source: FRA, Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism in the EU (2023); FRA, Being Black in the EU (2023); Müller, K., and Schwarz, C. (2021). "Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime." Journal of the European Economic Association, 19(4).

What the trends mean

The trajectory of hate crime reporting globally is, counterintuitively, a partial success story. More countries collecting more data, with better victim-centred systems and lower reporting barriers, produce more visible hate crime figures. The UK's 145,000 annual reports reflect an ongoing investment in making these incidents recordable; Germany's PMK system reflects a country that takes far-right violence seriously as a national security matter. The US's 11,000 FBI-reported figures, against an estimated 250,000 actual incidents, reflect the size of the undercount in a voluntary reporting system.

The genuinely concerning trends are those documented by multiple independent sources rather than single official series: the rising antisemitism measurable in ADL audit data, FRA surveys, and FBI data simultaneously; the documented surge in anti-Asian incidents during COVID-19 captured by Stop AAPI Hate reports before FBI data caught up; the correlation between online extremist content and offline violence in multiple academic studies. These convergent signals, across different measurement approaches, are more reliable than any single official statistic.

The countries most dangerous for racial, religious, and minority communities are often those with no hate crime tracking at all — where violence occurs, is unreported, unprosecuted, and invisible to statistics. The data we have is imperfect. The reality it represents is considerably worse.

Source: OSCE ODIHR, Hate Crime in the OSCE Region: Incidents and Responses, Annual Reports 2020–2023; FRA, Fundamental Rights Report 2023.

The takeaway

Hate crime data tells you more about a country's criminal justice infrastructure and recording culture than about the underlying distribution of prejudice and violence. The UK's 145,000 annual reports reflect a broad victim-perception definition and active recording policy; Germany's 40,000 PMK reflect a political crime framework with genuine and well-documented far-right activity; the US's 11,000 FBI-reported crimes represent a fraction of actual incidents due to voluntary reporting participation gaps and the classification failures that occur even when incidents are reported. The most dangerous environments for minority communities are frequently countries with no tracking at all — where the absence of data is not safety but invisibility. The appropriate response to high reported hate crime figures is not alarm at the number but attention to whether the underlying incidents are being addressed, the victims supported, and the perpetrators held to account. The goal is not a lower hate crime count; it is a lower hate crime count achieved through reduced incidence rather than reduced recording.

---

Read next:

• Countries with the Best Press Freedom
• Countries with the Highest Prison Rates
• Countries with the Highest Murder Rates
• Countries with the Highest Gender Equality
• Countries with the Most International Migrants