The Law Commission has finished its review of hate crime laws in Aotearoa New Zealand. It says the current system is not working well enough and should be fixed rather than replaced with new laws.

The report, published on 22 July 2026, makes 12 recommendations. The review began in early 2024 after the coalition government stopped a separate review of hate speech and asked the Commission to focus on hate crime instead. RNZ

The Commission's main conclusion is that courts should keep giving longer sentences to people who commit crimes because of hate toward a group. It decided not to recommend creating brand new hate crime offences, because it thought offenders would not be consistently charged with or convicted of them.

The review did not cover hate speech. It also did not look at making new behaviour illegal. It was only about how the justice system handles crimes that are already offences, when hostility toward a group is part of the motivation.

What needs to change

Right now, judges can already give a longer sentence if a crime was motivated by hostility toward a group with a shared characteristic — like race, religion, or sexuality. This is written in the Sentencing Act. But the Commission says this information often does not come up until sentencing, which is at the very end of a case.

The Commission wants the paperwork that starts a criminal case to say upfront when hate toward a group should be treated as something that makes the offence more serious. That way, the court knows about it from the start.

It also wants to remove a part of the current law that requires the offender to have believed the victim had the relevant characteristic. The Commission says removing that requirement would make the law simpler to apply.

Another recommendation is adding "sex" to the list of characteristics in the law, so that targeting someone because of their sex is clearly treated as a hate crime.

The Commission wants police to publish yearly data on hate crimes and the Ministry of Justice to publish yearly court data. It also wants judges to get training on the changes.

The Commission says courts should have to state publicly when a crime was motivated by hate toward a specific group. But it does not want the words "hate" or "hate crime" used in the law itself. It prefers the phrase "hostility to groups of people."

Why this review happened

The previous Labour government had planned to bring in hate speech laws after the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch terrorist attacks. The coalition government stopped that work and asked the Law Commission to look at hate crime instead, which is a narrower question about how the system handles existing crimes when hate is a factor.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith's response has been sought by RNZ. RNZ

The broader context here is that the Commission's choice of words matters. By using "hostility to groups of people" instead of "hate crime" in the law, it keeps things tied to a sentencing principle that already exists. That may make the changes less politically charged, but it also means the law will read differently from how advocates and the media talk about these crimes.