Law Commission Reports on Hate Crime Offences

Te Aka Matua o te Ture | Law Commission reviewed the law relating to hate crime, with a focus on whether the law should be changed to create standalone hate crime offences. 

The Commission’s Final Report concluded that the current legal model, which takes hostile motivation into account at sentencing, remains the most appropriate model compared to alternatives.

In deciding against standalone hate crime offences, the Commission considered overseas evidence and feedback from submitters and technical experts. It found that specific offences could add significant complexity, making prosecutors less likely to bring such charges because of the difficulty of proving them at trial. As a result, hostility-motivated offending might not be recognised at sentencing or recorded as hate crime.

However, the commission made 12 recommendations “to ensure hate crimes are consistently identified, recorded and denounced by the justice system.” These include:

• Creating a hate crime flag in court records, so Police can identify alleged hostility-based offending when charges are laid, and judges can address it at bail and sentencing. Judges would also be required to formally record the application of the hostility aggravating factor on the court record. The record would be available to later courts and shared with Police and Corrections to support offender management, rehabilitation, future investigations, and charging decisions. It would also improve national data on the justice system’s response to hate crime.
  
  
• Requiring judges to state expressly at sentencing when hostility was a motivating factor, to convey the seriousness of the offending. 
  
  
• Amending the Sentencing Act 2002 so the aggravating factor applies where a victim is targeted because of their association with an affected group, or where the victim is an innocent bystander.
  
  
• Adding sex to the protected characteristics covered by the sentencing aggravating factor, to clarify that hostility based on sex, including hostility towards women, may be treated as a hate crime.
  
  
• Providing guidance and training for Police, prosecutors, and judges, and publishing annual data on hostility-motivated offending.
   

Read more: Hara ngākau kino | Review of hate crime law (NZLC R152, 2026)