Most hate crimes were committed against Serbs, Croats, Jews and Roma, police chief Marijan Benko said, adding that those crimes constituted a marginal number of all crimes and that most had been solved.
Benko also mentioned several cases of glorification of Nazism, Fascism and the Ustasha ideology, but said that no such case had been reported since the October 2006 amendment of the Penal Code, which provided a separate definition of hate crime.
The chief of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe Mission to Croatia, Jorge Fuentes, said the Mission's field reports were not as optimistic as those of the Interior Ministry, but that the situation was under control and not dramatic.
He said hate crimes were present in every country and Croatia was no exception. He added that the problem were ethnically motivated crimes because they obstructed reconciliation, which he said was a must for Croatia.
The president of the parliamentary Committee on Human Rights and the Rights of National Minorities, Furio Radin, reminded the press that hate crime was incorporated into the Penal Code in the wake of numerous ethnic crimes.
The discussion was organised by the Interior Ministry and the OSCE Mission for the State Prosecutor's Office, the parliamentary committee and the European Commission Delegation to Croatia. They discussed ways of preventing hate crimes and possibilities of improving cooperation between the police and the judiciary.