BRUSSELS (AP) – The European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring all 27 members of the European Union a “zone of freedom” for LGBT people, an effort to prevent an increase in homophobia in Poland and elsewhere.
Parliament announced 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 in Brussels on Wednesday.
The resolution came largely as a reaction to events in the past two years in Poland, where many local communities have adopted largely symbolic resolutions, declaring themselves free from what conservative authorities have been calling “LGBT ideology”.
These cities say they seek to protect traditional families based on unions of men and women, but LGBT rights activists say the designations are discriminatory and make gays and lesbians feel unwanted. The areas have come to be known colloquially as “LGBT-free zones”.
Polish President Andrzej Duda won the re-election last summer, after a campaign in which he frequently spoke out against the LGBT rights movement, describing it as a threat to families. On one occasion, he described it as an “ideology” more dangerous 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 officials, elected officials – including by the current president”.
But it also mentions that discrimination remains a problem across the EU.
The Polish government denounced the resolution. It 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-standing attachment to Roman Catholicism. It accuses EU legislators of exceeding its jurisdiction.
The government 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 documented local anti-LGBT resolutions with the Atlas of Hate group, said that there is no mention in the Polish penal code specifically on homophobic crimes, so the police do not maintain statistics on such crimes.
“We don’t know the total number of these cases,” he said.
The European Parliament’s resolution states that the fundamental rights of LGBT people have also been “severely undermined” recently in Hungary, due to a de facto ban on legal gender recognition for trans and intersex people. He also notes that only two member states – Malta and Germany – have banned “conversion therapy”, a controversial and potentially damaging attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation.
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Corrects the spelling of the activist’s surname for Gawron.