Jūratė Ruzaitė

Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania

Title:

Explicit, Implicit, and Contextual: Legal‑Linguistic Insights into Hate Speech

Abstract:

Hate speech encompasses a spectrum of communicative practices, from overt expressions of hostility to subtle, context‑dependent forms that evade straightforward recognition. Drawing on European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case-law, this plenary shows how courts systematically integrate multi-level linguistic analysis, contextual factors, and social meaning when interpreting harmful language, with explicitness informing, but not determining, the Court’s evaluation of hate speech. Explicit hate is relatively easy to detect online and is more likely to warrant legal intervention, while implicit and camouflaged expressions (relying on cultural knowledge or coded cues) remain evasive and context‑sensitive, demanding nuanced interpretation.
To highlight this challenge, I present a Lithuanian court case involving a neologism deemed “linguistically neutral” despite its hostile intent, illustrating how implicit forms can escape legal sanction. I also discuss examples from online discourse that rely on intertextuality and coded expression — forms likely to be classified as hateful in (manual) linguistic analysis but overlooked under current legal frameworks.
The plenary concludes with reflections on implications for automated hate speech detection: systems based solely on surface semantics or explicit markers will miss context‑dependent and camouflaged hate speech, reinforcing the need for knowledge representations that integrate contextual, pragmatic, and discourse‑level understanding.

Bio:

Jūratė Ruzaitė is Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literary and Translation Studies, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Bergen, Norway. She currently coordinates the project “Features of hate speech and criteria for its identification: a linguistic and legal analysis”, funded by the Lithuanian Research Council, and has contributed to projects such as Semantika 2, which developed tools for detecting offensive online comments in Lithuanian.
She is a board member of the Lithuanian Association of Applied Linguistics and the International Language and Law Association. Her research focuses on sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, language and ideology, hate speech, and disinformation, combining linguistic theory and legal analysis to understand and address harmful language in public and digital discourse.