ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This article begins by confronting the practical and normative difficulties that arise from the premise that racial hate speech produces serious harms by undermining human equality and dignity. It first highlights the lack of uniformity in both meaning and terminological choices surrounding core vocabulary in this field—such as “hate,” “hatred,” “expression,” and “speech.” It then clarifies that the boundary between “incitement to hatred” and “hate speech” remains conceptually unstable. The article argues that such semantic and conceptual indeterminacy functions as a key driver of international and domestic divergence in the regulation of racial hate speech. Against this backdrop, the study conducts a comparative analysis at two levels. At the national level, it examines how the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France represent distinct positions on the regulatory spectrum regarding the balance between freedom of expression with controls on racial hate speech. At the international level, it investigates how the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the Human Rights Committee, and the European Court of Human Rights differ in institutional purpose, adjudicative structure, doctrinal thresholds, and modes of justification—differences that can contribute to a fragmented international regulatory landscape. In conclusion, the article does not treat such divergence as a mere defect to be eliminated. Instead, it recognizes a measure of normative dispersion as a realistic response to evolving social conditions, while proposing that coherence should be pursued through cross-referencing and principled consistency rather than rigid uniformity. It further suggests that CERD can play a “guiding” role by articulating normative content that other treaty bodies and binding judicial institutions may adopt in the development of law, thereby contributing—through an institutional division of labor—to the shifting boundary between protecting freedom of expression and regulating hate speech.

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