What happened: The Cybercrime and Digital Forensics Department at MOI pressed criminal charges before
the Primary Public Prosecutor’s Office Skopje against R.H. (46) from Skopje due to reasonable suspicion
of having committed the criminal offence “Spreading Racial and Xenophobic Material via an Information
System”, punishable pursuant to Article 394-d from the Criminal Code of RNM. The reported, on 25.11.2019,
at 10:14 a.m., posted an article shared from a web portal on his Facebook profile, thus committing the
crime.
Date, time and place of incident: 25.11.2019, Facebook.
Source of information: MOI’s daily newsletter.
Victim(s) involved: No victims.
Type of crime(s): Spreading Racial and Xenophobic Material via an Information System (Article 394-d, CC
of RNM).
Perpetrator(s): One unidentified perpetrator.
Brief description of the event with bias indicators: In this incident the bias motive is ethnicity, with the bias
indicators being:
1. Ethnicity – the perpetrator and victims belonged to a different ethnicity;
2. Location – the event occurred a place where similar incidents have previously been registered.
Status of case: Criminal charges pressed.
Response of the local authorities: Criminal charges pressed. The crime was qualified as a hate crime.
Impact on the victims and the community: These types of incidents call into question the general safety in
the country and the co-existence among different ethnic groups in society.
