Protester found guilty in Riga pride attack
An assistant to Latvian MP Dainis Turlais was found guilty of gross public disorderliness Jan. 15 for throwing what was likely a bag of feces at celebrants attending the 2006 gay pride events in Riga.
Janis Dzelme was sentenced to 100 hours of compulsory labor by the Vidzeme District Court for demonstrating what the court called an obvious lack of respect toward the public by ignoring universally accepted norms of behavior.
'This is an enormously important precedent which will send very strong signals to those people in Latvia who believe that freedom of assembly and freedom of speech should be limited with violence,' said Kristine Garina, chair of the pride-organizing group Mozaika.
Turlais is among the parliament's more anti-gay members. He reportedly has called gays 'faggots' and 'scum.'
Last year's Riga pride went relatively smoothly but in 2005, when activists first attempted to march, the 150 marchers were heavily outnumbered by around 1,000 anti-gay protesters who hurled insults, bottles and rotten eggs; blocked the streets; and forced the parade to be rerouted. The protesters chanted 'No sodomy' and 'Gays fuck the nation.'
Then, in 2006, the City Council banned the parade. Organizers responded by holding a religious service at a church and meetings at a hotel. Attendees at both were attacked by Christian, ultranationalist and neo-Nazi protesters who pelted them with eggs, rotten food and feces.
Last year, armed with a court ruling that the 2006 ban was unconstitutional, more than 500 GLBT people marched around a fenced-in park under heavy police protection, dodging only a paint-bomb, an ice-cream cone and a few firecrackers.
Police outnumbered the marchers and the approximately 100 jeering anti-gay demonstrators.
Scotland to pass GLBT hate-crime law
Scotland's hate-crime laws will be expanded to protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, the Scottish Executive pledged in a Jan. 15 media release.
'I am delighted to announce today Government support for a bill which will extend statutory aggravations to cover crimes motivated by malice or ill will towards victims based on their sexual orientation, transgender identity or disability,' said Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill.
'Our clear aim is to prevent and deter crimes. But where crime does happen it will not be tolerated.'
According to the GLBT Equality Network, a quarter of Scottish gays have been a victim of homophobic violence and two-thirds have been threatened or harassed.
The Scottish Conservative Party opposes the change. The party's justice spokesman, Bill Aitken, said, 'In Scotland, we pride ourselves in the fact that we are all equal in the eyes of the law but some it now seems are more equal than others, which cannot be right.'
GLBT-inclusive hate-crime laws already are in force in the rest of the United Kingdom.
Straight bouncer called 'breeder' wins discrimination case
A straight bouncer at the Bournemouth, England, gay club Dreams was awarded $12,400 in compensation Jan. 4 because the club's manager called her a 'breeder' and fired her, the BBC reported.
An employment tribunal in Southampton agreed that Sharon Legg, 33, was unfairly dismissed from her job.
She received $6,000 for hurt feelings and the remainder for the firing itself.
'It's an achievement basically for gay, bi and straight people,' Legg told the network. 'It's about basically proving a point that you just don't treat people like that ... whether you're straight, gay or bi.'
'If ... the shoe was on the other foot, I don't think it would be tolerated,' she said.
Traveling government exhibit celebrates Czech gay history
A government-curated exhibition documenting and celebrating Czech gay history has opened in Prague and later will travel around the nation, including to small towns, Radio Prague reported Jan. 9.
The exhibition's curator is the government's minister for human rights and minorities, Dzamila Stehlíková, and its coordinator is veteran Czech gay activist Jirí Hromada.
'Twenty years ago homosexual citizens were the first group who began to speak about human rights,' Stehlíková said. 'Now, after 20 years of gay and lesbian development, we have a registered-partnership law, and the homosexual minority is part of democratic society, with its own structure and with a very interesting cultural and social life.'
The exhibition, now at the capital's House of National Minorities, includes gay magazines, old photos, and videos of the disturbing debate in the Chamber of Deputies over the registered-partnership law.
Openly gay singer Pavel Vítek told Radio Prague: 'What I have been most taken by is ... the history, which you now forget, of the period at the end of the 1980s and the start of the '90s. And I have also really been struck by the discreditable language used by our politicians, both men and women, when registered partnerships were being discussed. It's certainly worth hearing Justice Minister Parkanová and others again!'
Stehlíková is excited about taking the exhibit on the road.
'In some small towns many people with homosexual orientation have complications with coming out and this exhibition will help them to understand their own identity and to begin to live their own lives,' she told Radio Prague.
Gay Canadian organ donors to face extra scrutiny
Males who had sex with a man within the past five years will face heightened scrutiny in the organ-donation system under a Health Canada policy enacted in December, The Globe and Mail reported Jan. 10.
Health officials will speak to the donor's family and friends to glean information about the individual's behavior and warn potential recipients of the details.
Even though organs are tested for such things as HIV and hepatitis B and C, officials worry that the testing may not be definitive.
Canada bans blood donation by any man who has had sex with a man, even once, in the last 22 years.
Moscow polling-place protesters acquitted
Thirteen gay activists detained Dec. 2 at a Moscow polling place have been acquitted by a local magistrate's court.
Some of the activists had 'voted' by writing 'No to homophobes -- No to Luzhkov' on their ballots.
Strongly anti-gay Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov was scheduled to vote at the same site an hour later. He banned the city's first two gay pride parades in 2006 and 2007, calling them 'satanic.'
The activists -- including Moscow Pride organizers Nikolai Alekseev, Nikolai Baev and Alexey Davydov -- were taken into custody by police and security forces and held for seven hours at the Tverskoi district police station for allegedly picketing without advance notification to the authorities.
But the court determined that no picket had occurred and that police were unable to specify a crime the activists had committed. As such, it also was illegal for police to detain the activists for more than three hours.
'This is our first considerable victory in courts in the legal fight with Moscow authorities and Moscow mayor personally,' Alekseev said Jan. 11. 'Lawlessness of the authorities can be witnessed during all our actions but up to now we never won in court. This is a positive signal.'
He said the activists may sue the police for illegal detention and arrest.
New Bolivian Constitution not good for gays
Although the final wording of Bolivia's planned new constitution bans discrimination based on sexual orientation, the document also will ban same-sex marriage, defining matrimony as the union of a man and a woman, according to a report in La Paz's La Prensa. The definition also would apply to common-law marriage.
If the constitution is ratified in a national referendum, Bolivia will become the sixth nation to ban anti-gay discrimination via its constitution, and the first to protect transgender people constitutionally.
Gay groups called the planned protections a huge advance, but lamented that the document might impede recognition of same-sex partnerships.
The other nations that protect gays constitutionally are Canada, Ecuador, Fiji, South Africa and Switzerland. Sweden's constitution, in a section on press freedom, prohibits agitation and threats against gay people as a group.
Online homophobes prosecuted in the Netherlands
A Dutch man who was subjected to a barrage of homophobic abuse in an online chat room took a printout of the attack to police and got the offenders prosecuted, Radio Netherlands Worldwide reported Dec. 31.
Franklin Hill, a 32-year-old flight attendant, was bashed with comments such as 'Dirty faggot,' 'Death to fags' and 'The Third Reich should be resurrected.'
A court determined that such language is illegal and sentenced one of the bashers to 15 hours of community service and fined another one 750 euros ( $1,100 ) .
'The fact that they now know they can't just say what they want in a chat room, and that they didn't get away with it, gives me satisfaction,' Hill told the radio station.
'You just have to do something about it when people do something like this,' he said. 'There are enough laws and legislation to take on discrimination and threats.'
Uruguay civil-union bill signed into law
President Tabaré Vázquez signed a bill Dec. 27 making Uruguay the first Latin American country to grant same-sex couples access to civil unions on the national level.
The legislation, which passed the Senate in September and the House of Representatives in November, took effect Jan. 1.
Couples must live together for five years before they can take advantage of the law, which grants spousal rights in areas that include inheritance, property ownership, pensions, parenting and health care.
The law applies to 'two people—whatever their sex, identity, orientation or sexual option may be—who maintain an emotional relationship of a sexual nature [ and ] an exclusive, singular, stable and permanent character without being united in matrimony.'
Other Latin American localities with civil-union laws include the city of Buenos Aires, the Argentine province of Río Negro, the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, Mexico City, and the Mexican state of Coahuila, which borders Texas.
