BRUSSELS (AP) – The European Parliament has overwhelmingly adopted a resolution in which the entire European Union with 27 members is an ‘area of freedom’ for LGBT people, and an attempt to suppress the rising homophobia in Poland and elsewhere.
Parliament on Thursday announced that there were 492 ballots in favor of the resolution and 141 against it in a vote that came after a debate in a session of parliament. Wednesday in Brussels.
The resolution is largely in response to developments over the past two years in Poland, where many local communities have largely adopted symbolic resolutions to free themselves from what conservative authorities call ‘LGBT ideology’.
According to these towns, they want to protect traditional families on the basis of unions of men and women, but LGBT rights activists believe the names are discriminatory and make gays and lesbians feel unwelcome. The areas became known as ‘LGBT free zones’.
Polish President Andrzej Duda won re-election last summer after a campaign in which he often spoke out against the LGBT rights movement and presented it as a threat to families. At one point he described it as an ‘ideology’ more dangerous than communism.
The resolution is the work of a party group in the European Parliament, the LGBTI Intergroup. The text refers to ‘growing hate speech by public authorities, elected officials – also by the current president’ of Poland.
But it also mentions that discrimination remains a problem throughout the EU.
The Polish government has challenged the resolution. It claims that Poland, as a sovereign nation and a more conservative society than many Western European countries, has the right to defend its traditional family values on the basis of a long association with Roman Catholicism. It accuses EU lawmakers of exceeding their jurisdiction.
The government also argued that the number of hate crimes in Poland is lower than in many countries in Western Europe.
However, LGBT rights activists say it is impossible to measure. Kuba Gawron, who has documented local anti-LGBT resolutions with the group Atlas of Hate, said that Polish criminal law does not specifically mention homophobic crimes, and therefore the police do not keep statistics on such crimes.
“We do not know the full number of such cases,” he said.
The European Parliament’s resolution states that the fundamental rights of LGBT people have also been ‘seriously hampered’ in Hungary recently due to a de facto ban on legal gender recognition for transgender and intersex people. It is also noted that only two member states – Malta and Germany – have banned ‘conversion therapy’, a controversial and potentially damaging attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation.
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Correct the spelling of the surname of the activist after Gawron.