The aim of the paper is to compare the judicial practice of the European Court of Human Rights and Slovenian legal regulations regarding hate speech. While the European Court of Human Rights allows the states to exercise a relatively wide scope of powers in prosecuting hate speech, Slovenian legislation, and particularly its implementation, rarely considers hateful speech as problematic. The paper analyses this problem and exposes the reasons for such a state of affairs. The indulgent attitude towards the hate speech problem (especially from the state prosecution) is identified as a major contributor. The paper presents the historical role of the state prosecution in prosecuting the so-called verbal delict from the times of former Yugoslavia as a possible cause for such an attitude.
