BRUSSELS (PA) – The European Parliament has overwhelmingly adopted a resolution declaring the entire European Union a 27-member “freedom zone” for LGBT people, an effort to push back the rise of homophobia in Poland and elsewhere.
Parliament announced on Thursday that there were 492 votes in favor and 141 against in a vote that came after a debate in a parliamentary session. on Wednesday in Brussels.
The resolution came largely in response to developments over the past two years in Poland, where many local communities have adopted largely symbolic resolutions declaring themselves free of what conservative authorities have called “LGBT ideology”.
These cities say they are trying to protect traditional families based on unions of men and women, but LGBT rights activists say the designations are discriminatory and make gays and lesbians feel uncomfortable. The areas came to be colloquially known as “LGBT-free areas.”
Polish President Andrzej Duda won re-election last summer after a campaign in which he often spoke out against the LGBT rights movement, describing it as a threat to families. He once described it as a more “dangerous” ideology than communism.
The resolution is the work of a multi-party group in the European Parliament, the LGBTI intergroup. The text refers to “growing hate speeches by public authorities, elected officials – including the current president” of Poland.
But it also mentions that discrimination remains a problem across the EU.
The Polish government denounced the resolution. He argues 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-standing attachment to Roman Catholicism. He accuses EU lawmakers of overstepping their jurisdiction.
The government also claimed that hate crime rates are lower in Poland than in many Western European countries.
However, LGBT rights activists say this is impossible to measure. Kuba Gawron, who documented local anti-LGBT resolutions with the Atlas of Hate group, said there was no mention in the Polish criminal code specifically of homophobic crimes, so 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 stated that the fundamental rights of LGBT people have also been “severely hampered” recently in Hungary, due to the de facto ban on legal recognition of gender for transgender and intersex people. It also notes that only two Member States – Malta and Germany – have banned “conversion therapy”, a controversial and potentially harmful attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation.
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Corrects the spelling of the activist’s last name to Gawron.