LGBTI news 3: Jamaica, Russia, Ukraine

News briefs about countries with anti-gay laws or considering anti-gay legislation, excerpted with slight modifications from UNAIDS’s Equal Eyes recap of the world’s LGBTI-related news. (This is the third of three posts. The first one reported news from Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Brunei. The second one reported news from Iran, Morocco, ISIS, Kenya, Gambia and Uganda.)

AMERICAS

In the UK, bisexual asylum seeker Orashia Edwards of Jamaica had his deportation flight cancelled, though the reprieve is temporary.

EUROPE

During Russia‘s 10th Moscow Pride police detained Pride participants, including the parade organizer, while around 30 anti-LGBT demonstrators hurled eggs at the activists.

Journalists said that police officers detained the activists for attempting to stage an unauthorised gay pride rally and loaded them into waiting vans as around 30 nationalist counter-demonstrators in camouflage clothing and football fans hurled eggs at the activists and attacked them.

Several religious counter-demonstrators were also detained by police .
“Arrested and beaten at 10th Moscow Pride. We are arrested! They probably broke my left hand finger,” leading gay rights activist Nikolai Alexeyev wrote on Twitter, posting a photo of himself in detention. Alexeyev, a prominent LGBT activist and lawyer and main organizer of the gay pride parade, was sentenced to 10 days in jail for “disobeying police orders.”

See Also

Anti-gay lawyers seek to oust Tonga’s openly gay chief justice

Also in Russia, the Orthodox Church cut ties with France’s United Protestant Church, which allows the blessing of same-sex marriages, and the Church of Scotland, which allows ordaining clergy in same-sex civil unions. The Moscow Patriarchate noted that it had previously suspended ties with the U.S. Episcopal Church in 2003 after it consecrated an openly gay bishop, and with Sweden’s Lutheran Church after it sanctioned ceremonies for civil unions in 2005.

An anti-LGBT group in Ukraine called Zero Tolerance posted photos of LGBT activists, noting they “do not deserve to live.” Zero Tolerance is one of the groups affiliated with far-right Ukrainian nationalists that launched online campaigns threatening LGBT activists after an LGBT rights march was attacked.“For the first time I am afraid for my and my boyfriend’s lives,” LGBT activist Dmitry Pikakhchi said. “Considering the number of these posts, the number of participants [of the group] and the radicalism — I think that the danger is more than real.” Pikakhchi said he was especially worried about Zero Tolerance hosted on the Russian-owned social network VKontakte, which is the dominant social network in much of the former Soviet Union. The group, which has more than 2,800 followers, has posted a photo album of at least a dozen people the group’s moderators say are LGBT activists.“These degenerates do not deserve to live,” said one person who posted to page. Another wrote, “Homothugs will be destroyed.”

For more information, read the full edition of Equal Eyes.