The Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner on Monday said that he was “deeply concerned” by an LGBTQ “promotion” ban passed by the Bulgarian parliament, urging Bulgarian President Rumen Radev “not to sign it.”
Bulgaria on Wednesday last week passed changes to its education law, widening its scope to ban LGBTQ “propaganda” in schools in what rights groups have slammed as “discriminatory.”
The law now bans the “propaganda, promotion or incitement in any way, directly or indirectly, in the education system of ideas and views related to nontraditional sexual orientation and/or gender identity other than the biological one.”
Photo: AFP
Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Michael O’Flaherty wrote on social media that he was “deeply concerned by the recent law passed by Bulgaria’s Parliament to ban so-called LGBTI ‘propaganda’ in schools.”
“I call on President Radev not to sign it,” he wrote. “Authorities should tackle discrimination and hostile rhetoric against LGBTI people, including in the run-up to elections.”
The amendment, which was proposed by the EU nation’s pro-Russian Vazrazhdane party, sparked protests in the capital, with demonstrators chanting: “Shame on you.”
Homophobic ideas often feature in Bulgaria’s political debate and in the media, as the former communist republic faces its seventh parliamentary elections in three-and-a-half years amid serious political instability.
Lawmakers blamed a need to act quickly on what they deemed as the “unacceptable normalization of a nontraditional sexual orientation” in “propaganda.”
Lawmakers took advantage of the climate of “culture war” around the Paris Olympics to pass the reform, said lawyer Denitsa Lyubenova from the Deystvie LGBTQ rights group.
Bulgaria also criticized Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting (林郁婷), Olympic athletes who they said represented “the other sex.”
The Balkan nation does not recognize same-sex marriage or civil unions.
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