So far there has been no consensus on the proper approach to incidences of ‘hate speech’ in democratic regimes. However, both democratic governments and international organizations concerned with democratic principles adopt certain, sometimes conflicting, approaches, which creates the potential for dynamic interaction between international and domestic politics. This paper investigates the impact of the Council of Europe (CoE) on country-level approaches towards ‘hate speech’ (HS) in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. The analysis of the different mechanisms of the CoE’s impact on the national level in three dimensions (political, judicial, civil) identifies the ‘gentle power potential’ of the CoE in general and its manifestation in determining the ‘right’ approach vis-à-vis HS in member states in particular. The CoE as gentle power uses several channels in the case of HS to uphold or modify certain domestic approaches to this phenomenon in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. At theoretical level, these results challenge the conventional neorealist understanding of IOs such as the CoE. While they do not dispute the neoliberal institutionalist understanding, they indicate that the independent impact of the CoE as gentle power can best be understood with the help of constructivist analysis.
