Slovak Courts and Cultural Expertise in 'Hate Speech' Cases: Between Scylla and Charybdis?

The 2016 Slovak general elections resulted in an extreme right party entering the parliament for the first time. In response to this development, the governing coalition signaled the law enforcement agencies and courts the preference for them to adopt a more restrictive attitude to instances of 'hate speech' uttered by extreme political actors. These signals included the Specialized Criminal Court as the judicial institution responsible for deciding on gravest criminal matters gaining the competence to adjudicate these cases in the first instance, and an amendment of legislation introducing more restrictions on ‘hate speech’. Law enforcement agencies followed suit, and have invoked their legal right to marshal the resources of experts in the social sciences to help them analyze instances of 'hate speech'. These experts are required to avoid discussing 'questions of law' in their analyses, and are expected to communicate their knowledge exclusively through formal written and oral testimonies. In this paper I examine the consequences of expert witness involvement in high-profile Slovak 'hate speech' cases involving extreme political actors through a multi-method analysis. I do so via (1) utilizing the concept of cultural expertise, that highlights the importance of specialized contextual knowledge to assist the resolution of societal conflicts, and (2) triangulating data from the proceedings and media reports thereof, judicial decisions and interviews with expert witnesses. I find that cultural expertise as implemented in the Slovak legal system has been challenged by the extreme political actors through techniques of delegitimizing its scientific character. To the extent courts referred to the information provided by the expert witnesses, they were also labelled as giving up on their independence by engaging in 'political trials' against the 'true opposition' to the ruling political actors. Moreover, regardless of the prosecutions and one prominent conviction of an extreme right MP, the respective political party did not lose electoral support in the 2020 Slovak general elections. The inquiry into the strategies of the extreme political actors generates recommendations for adjustments of the legal regulation and practice of cultural expertise towards more nuanced reporting by the media, the recognition of expert witnesses in high-profile cases as public figures in relation to those cases, and the facilitation of interdisciplinary collaboration between experts and their institutions. These results are the starting point to understand the promises and limits of cultural expertise in 'hate speech' cases, particularly those involving high-profile political actors.