Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko signed legislation on Wednesday that outlaws the “propaganda of homosexual relations, gender change, refusal to have children, and pedophilia,” providing new tools for Belarusian authorities to continue their ongoing crackdown on the national LGBTQ+ community.
The United Nations Human Rights Council called the new law “a dangerous escalation.”
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“By conflating human rights advocacy and information about sexual orientation, gender identity, and reproductive autonomy with administrative offenses, the authorities are fueling prejudice and legitimizing discrimination,” the panel said.
“Persecution against already marginalized groups and defenders of their rights” will be legitimized with the new law, the panel added.
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Human Rights Watch said the legislation “furthers the legal and political alignment between Belarus and Russia, which both seek to stigmatize minority groups, control public discourse, and suppress dissent.”
Lukashenko, known among European Union (EU) democracies as “Europe’s last dictator,” has been working in lockstep with authoritarian Russian President Vladimir Putin to advance anti-democratic policies along Europe’s eastern frontier, including mocking the LGBTQ+ community as an example of “degenerate” Western values.
Russia first instituted a law targeting LGBTQ+ “propaganda” in 2013, citing its alleged threat to children. It expanded the ban in 2022 to cover all media in the country. In 2023, Russia’s high court designated the “international LGBT movement” as a terrorist organization. The policies have mostly been used to silence LGBTQ+ activist organizations, events, websites, and media, as well as to break up families and harass teachers.
Belarus decriminalized homosexuality in 1994 after the fall of the Soviet Union, but under Lukashenko’s decades-long reign, LGBTQ+ people have come under increasing threat. Belarus lacks any basic protections for LGBTQ+ rights.
Human rights organizations in Belarus, including the transgender advocacy group TG House, say the community is routinely targeted by the country’s security forces, with raids on nightclubs, private parties, and blackmail schemes forcing LGBTQ+ people into cooperation.
In 2022, a gay couple reported they were attacked in their own home by security forces unleashed by Lukashenko after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was staged in part through Belarus. Police demanded the couple unlock their phones and reveal the names of “gays in Minsk and Moscow.”
“They wanted to expose an ‘underground network’ of gay people in Belarus, following the example of Russia,” the couple said of the raid. “They openly told us that if it is banned in Russia, then it should be banned in Belarus, too.”
Earlier this month, following passage of the bill through the Belarus Parliament, the EU condemned the legislation, saying “the Belarusian regime’s increasing cooperation with Russian security services heightens the risk of coordinated repression, surveillance and hybrid threats in EU territory.”
Like Russia’s recent conjuring of a coordinated and non-existent “international LGBT movement,” the Belarus government’s conflation of gay sex, transgender people, pedophilia, and “childlessness” just duplicates “Russia’s sad experience,” said TG House’s Alisa Sarmant.
“The Belarusian authorities have lumped together gays, lesbians, transgender people, and pedophiles, creating additional grounds for social rejection and stigmatization,” she said, creating “unbearable conditions for LGBT+ people.”
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