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Turkey there are ongoing court cases against peaceful Pride marchers and other cases against human rights defenders, and in Ukraine the Odessa Pride event was attacked.”
In Azerbaijan “hate crimes against the LGBT community continued to be a serious issue [in 2020],” according to the report.
Among several violent incidents, two gay men were attacked in Baku in May but the police failed to investigate; Aysu Mammadli, a trans woman and sex worker, was stabbed to death in Baku by an alleged client; 18-year-old Sevgia- Subkhani Ismayilova was subjected
to family violence after coming out to her mother; and a young gay couple received multiple death threats after they shared a post of themselves on Valentine’s Day which went viral.
Abuse of emergency powers
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban used the emergency powers approved by the parliament in March to issue
a decree that made it impossible for transgender people to legally change their gender.
At the end of the year, when
Parliament again voted to give the government emergency powers, several constitutional amendments were put forward, including one that would ban adoption by same-sex couples. The proposed amendment would specify that "the mother is a woman, the father is a man" and permit only married couples to adopt children.
On December 14, MPs amended the Fundamental Law “to further entrench the anti-trans framework by establishing children’s “right” to identify with
their birth sex, to be ‘protected’ from interventions to change it, and to be educated according to Christian values,” according to the report.
Also in December, Parliament voted to abolish the Equal Treatment Authority (ETA), replacing it with the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights, a post held by government loyalist Akos Kozma.
Orban has sought to build an alliance
among the new EU members against the liberal values of the older EU members in Western Europe. The Hungarian strong- man called on neighbouring governments to stand up for Christian values, warning against Western efforts to “experiment with a godless cosmos, rainbow families, migration and open societies”.
A separate dispute broke out over ‘Wonderland is for Everyone’, a children’s book published by Labrisz Lesbian Association that became an online bestseller. Our Homeland Movement MP Dora Duro publicly shredded the book,
scapegoated the LGBTI community on his way to election victory,” said the report.
He won a narrow victory and in protest against his anti-LGBT rhetoric, the parliamentary representation of the
Left showed up at the swearing-in in. Moreover, dozens of Polish municipalities have adopted declarations they are “free of LGBT ideology”, a concept peddled
by the government led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party. This resulted in some being denied applications for EU grants under the twinning programme, with Equality Commissioner Helena
“In December Hungarian MPs amended the Fundamental Law “to further entrench the anti-trans framework by establishing children’s
“right” to identify with their birth sex”
and Orban said homosexuals should “leave our kids alone”.
“More destructive” than Communism As Poland’s June 2020 presidential election approached, incumbent President Andrzej Duda said that the Polish LGBT rights movement peddles an “ideology” that is “more destructive” than Communism.
“There are attempts to convince us that [LGBT] are people but this is simply an ideology,” Duda said.
“My parents’ generation didn’t fight the communist ideology for 40 years to ... now allow another, even more destructive, ideology to come,” the president added.
Duda’s message was calculated to pander to the core of his electorate, conservative Catholic Poles, as he presented himself as the defender of family and traditional values.
“The hate campaign against the LGBTI community in Poland, which started
in October 2018, resulted in LGBTI people becoming a dominant issue during [2020]’s presidential elections, in which President Duda degraded and
Dalli commenting: "EU values and fundamental rights must be respected by member states and public authorities.”
The gender issue
Several contributors to the review expressed fears their countries could follow in the footsteps of Hungary and Poland.
Elsewhere among the newer EU member states, the Romanian parliament approved a law banning the teaching
of gender studies in schools and universities, and forbade teachers and professors even to address the subject of being trans. Proposed by the centre-right Popular Movement Party and publicly supported by the orthodox church, the law sparked widespread criticism. In December, the Constitutional Court ruled that the ban was unconstitutional.
The issue of gender also continues to loom large in Bulgaria, which has seen growing anti-gender rhetoric focused on the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, also known as the Istanbul Convention.
This was "to a large extent due to the efforts of the nationalist and populist Bulgarian National Movement (IMRO)
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