BRUSSELS (AP) – The European Parliament has overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring the entire 27-member European Union a “zone of freedom” for LGBT people, an attempt to curb growing homophobia in Poland and elsewhere.
Parliament announced on Thursday that there were 492 votes in favor of the resolution and 141 against in a vote following a debate during a parliamentary term. Wednesday in Brussels.
The resolution came largely in response to developments over the past two years in Poland, where many local communities have passed largely symbolic resolutions declaring themselves free from what conservative authorities call ‘LGBT ideology’.
These cities say they are trying to protect traditional families on the basis of men’s and women’s unions, but LGBT rights activists say the designations are discriminatory and make gays and lesbians feel unwelcome. The areas are popularly known as ‘LGBT free zones’.
Polish President Andrzej Duda won reelection last summer after a campaign in which he often spoke out against the LGBT rights movement, describing it as a threat to families. In one instance he described it as an “ideology” more dangerous than communism.
The resolution is the work of a cross-party group in the European Parliament, the LGBTI intergroup. The text refers to “growing hate speech by public authorities, elected officials – including by the current president” of Poland.
But it also mentions that discrimination remains a problem across the EU.
The Polish government has denounced the resolution. It argues that Poland, as a sovereign nation and a society more conservative than many Western European countries, has the right to defend its traditional family values based on a long attachment to Roman Catholicism. It accuses EU lawmakers of exceeding their jurisdiction.
The government has also argued that the number of hate crimes in Poland is lower than in many countries in Western Europe.
However, according to LGBT rights activists, this is impossible to measure. Kuba Gawron, who has documented local anti-LGBT resolutions with the Atlas of Hate group, said there is no specific mention of homophobic crimes in the Polish Penal Code, so the police do not keep statistics of such crimes.
“We don’t know the full number of such cases,” he said.
The European Parliament resolution states that the fundamental rights of LGBT people have also recently been “seriously hampered” in Hungary, due to a de facto ban on legal gender recognition 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.
Corrects the spelling of the activist’s last name to Gawron.