BRUSSELS (AP) – The European Parliament has overwhelmingly adopted a resolution declaring the entire 27-member European Union a “zone of freedom” for LGBT people, an effort to reverse 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 that came after a debate in a session of parliament Wednesday in Brussels.
The resolution came largely as a reaction to the evolution of the past two years in Poland, where many local communities have adopted largely symbolic resolutions declaring themselves free of what conservative authorities have been calling “LGBT ideology.”
These cities claim to seek to protect traditional families based on male and female unions, but LGBT rights activists say the designations are discriminatory and make gays and lesbians feel unwelcome. The areas have been colloquially known as “LGBT free zones.”
Polish President Andrzej Duda won re-election last summer after a campaign in which he often protested against the LGBT rights movement, which posed him as a threat to families. On one occasion, he 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 Poland’s “growing hate speech by public authorities, elected officials, including the current president”.
But he also mentions that discrimination remains a problem across the EU.
The Polish government has 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 based on a long hold on Roman Catholicism. It accuses EU lawmakers of overstepping its jurisdiction.
The government has also argued 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 has been documenting local anti-LGBT resolutions with the Atlas of Hate group, said there is no mention in the Polish penal code specifically about homophobic crimes, so police do not keep statistics on these crimes.
“We don’t know the full number of these cases,” he said.
The European Parliament resolution said the fundamental rights of LGBT people have also been “severely hampered” recently in Hungary, due to the de facto ban on legal gender recognition for trans and intersex people. He also points out 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 in Gawron.