Field hockey and ice ballet are” - a saying attributed to a famous Soviet actress.Īt this time Dmitri Bartenev was working as a lawyer and helping Russian LGBT organisations with a number of different human rights cases. This challenge was readily accepted.īoth were arrested and fined, and Alekseyev was fined again in 2012 while protesting another “gay propaganda” law in St Petersburg, after holding a sign which read “Homosexuality is not a perversion. Their choice to protest outside a school and a children’s library challenged the Russian authorities to arrest them for spreading information about LGBT rights to children. Like Bayev, they had travelled to stage a protest that would potentially see them fined under the region’s “gay propaganda” law, in the hopes that they would be able to successfully contest either their fines or the constitutionality of the laws themselves. One claimed that a lack of information about LGBT rights contributed to Russia having the world’s highest teenage suicide rate, while the other listed a number of prominent Russian public figures believed to be gay. Two more LGBT activists, Aleksey Kiselev and Nikolay Alekseyev, travelled to a children’s library in the region and displayed two banners. The police issued him a fine of 1,500 Russian roubles, equivalent to about €34, and his appeal against the fine was denied by a District Court.Īnother region, Arkhangelsk Oblast, approved similar measures in 2011 and saw near-identical protests. People noticed his protest and he was quickly charged with an administrative offence. Setting up a picket outside a secondary school he unfurled two banners proclaiming: “Homosexuality is normal” and “I am proud of my homosexuality”.
Russian LGBT activist Nikolay Bayev travelled to Ryazan specifically to publicly protest the law in early 2009. These laws came into force at a time when openly homophobic rhetoric was rising in Russia, and LGBT rights organisations have since linked their adoption in Russia to an increase in violence against LGBT people and a decrease in protection for LGBT people from the State.īy 2013 the country’s children’s commissioner went so far as to say that protection of the “traditional family” was a matter of national security, and that politicians who opposed this priority should be “cursed for centuries as destroyers of the family and the human race”. It was amended to make it an offence to take part in “the promotion of homosexuality among minors” in 2008, justified by citing the myth that gay men plan to “recruit” young people into becoming homosexual. Ostensibly focused on the “Protection of the Morality of Children”, the law in the Ryazan Oblast prohibited “public actions aimed at propaganda of homosexuality (sodomy or lesbianism) among minors”.
Russia’s first “gay propaganda” law was brought into force in an administrative region not far outside of Moscow in 2006. LGBT activists took the government to the European Court of Human Rights to argue that their rights to freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination were being trampled. The law seriously affected children across Russia, effectively denying them their right to information about gender and sexual diversity. In 2013 Russia enacted a federal law prohibiting what it called “gay propaganda”, using the protection of children as an excuse to silence any public discussions or positive messages about LGBT issues.