Hate speech is not defined in international law, especially human rights law. However, several treaties provide for racial, gender, ethnic and religious discrimination. The Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) calls on states to criminalize all incitement to genocide and not to prevent incitement to commit it. Article 4 of the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination imposes a number of obligations on States. Accordingly, states must assume six main obligations regarding hate speech and racial discrimination, namely to prohibit such acts by law. These include dissemination of ideas about racial superiority; disseminating of ideas about racial hatred; incitement to racial discrimination; acts of racially motived violence; incitement to acts of racially motived violence; and assistance for any racist activity of any kind. This treaty is more about race and racial discrimination. However, several articles of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), including Articles 19 and 20, generally mention hate speech and prohibit all forms of incitement to violence and ethnic, religious or racial discrimination. This treaty is an attempt to reconcile and balance both the right to equality before the law and freedom of expression. The treaty also mentions the “duties” that are consistent with freedom of expression, so it is normal to impose certain restrictions on the exercise of that freedom out of respect and protection for individuals or groups. Article 25 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) prohibits and punishes all direct and public incitement to genocide.
As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says, regulating hate speech does not mean restricting freedom of expression, but preventing it from becoming a threat to violence and extremism, which are prohibited by international law. In the Kurdistan Region this is regulated by law. Article 3 of the Kurdistan Parliament's Law No. 5 of 2015 on the Protection of the Rights of Ethnic and Religious Communities in the Kurdistan Region prohibits all propaganda of hatred and violence on the basis of nationality, religion, ethnicity or language. The same article prohibits all forms of discrimination against any community. However, it must be noticed that this law did not specify any concrete penalties for violators, which makes it remain only as some general principles. There is no community-specific law in Iraq, and some laws discriminate against non-Muslim communities, and Iraqi and Kurdish social media are full of insults against women and people belonging to ethnic and religious communities, sometimes reaching the level of collective violence and injuries. Addressing these gaps in the laws is mandatory.