A Call for Urgent Action Against Rising Anti-LGBTI Hate
At the launch of our 2025 Annual Review, ILGA-Europe’s Advocacy Director, Katrin Hugendubel delivered a stark warning about the growing wave of anti-LGBTI hate, misinformation, and legislative attacks across the region. As governments weaponise discrimination to undermine democracy, she called for urgent political action to protect fundamental rights and freedoms. In today’s blog we share the full text of her speech.
Our Annual Review of the Human Rights Situation of LGBTI People in Europe and Central Asia, released this week, strives to provide a clear and comprehensive overview of the realities on the ground. The findings are based on individual cases, notable events, and legislative, political, and social developments, as well as data gathered from our own work and insights from LGBTI activists across the 54 countries covered in the report.
In recent years, LGBTI activists and organisations across Europe and Central Asia have repeatedly highlighted the worrying rise and normalisation of hate and violence in our region, including numerous attacks on LGBTI rights that systematically undermine fundamental freedoms.
The 2025 Annual Review once again evidences a clear increase in hate and violence. Furthermore, it illustrates how ongoing LGBTI-phobic hate and misinformation campaigns have laid the groundwork for legislation such as anti-propaganda and foreign agent laws. These laws, which ostensibly target LGBTI rights, actually extend much further—introducing censorship, stigmatisation, and persecution of human rights defenders and opposition voices; anti-democratic interference in elections through disinformation campaigns; and, ultimately, laws that erode fundamental freedoms and the principles of democracy. LGBTI rights are being used as an entry point for broader repressive measures.
LGBTI-phobic hate speech, sexism, and misogyny are increasingly normalised, often fuelled by public figures, including political and religious leaders and state institutions. Politicians in several countries, including Austria, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Czechia, Moldova, and Romania, have weaponised discriminatory narratives against LGBTI people during election periods.
To cite just a few examples: in Austria, the far-right FPÖ spoke of “transgender brainwashing” and sought to cut taxpayer funding for what it termed “queer experiments”. In Belgium, Vlaams Belang repeatedly invoked the notion of “gender madness”. The President of Republika Srpska in Bosnia & Herzegovina was fined for hate speech during the election campaign.
The Georgian Elections Observatory (GEO), which focuses on fact-checking pre-election narratives, analysed statements made by senior members of the ruling Georgian Dream party, revealing that ‘LGBT propaganda’ was framed as a Western imposition and linked to a perceived threat to national survival. A similar misinformation campaign in Moldova suggested the country would be overrun by the Western LGBTI agenda ahead of the October elections. In Romania, Călin Georgescu’s electoral campaign during the first presidential election round intensified hate speech against the LGBTI community, even advocating for the re-criminalisation of homosexuality in the Penal Code.
Hate crimes and violent incidents have been reported in the vast majority of countries covered in this report. In Albania, these include stoning attacks against lesbian activists and physical assaults on trans women, with no accountability measures taken. A migrant trans woman was murdered in a hotel room in Copenhagen. Just one day after the Georgian Parliament passed its anti-LGBTI law, celebrity trans woman Kesaria Abramidze was found brutally murdered in her apartment.
In Armenia, while the successful prosecution of the country’s first hate crime against a gay man marks progress, violence against trans people remains unaddressed, and draft anti-discrimination legislation continues to stall. In Germany, during Pride season (June–September 2024), the Centre for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy documented a surge in extremist mobilisation against Pride events across 27 cities, involving violence and intimidation. The Federal Ministry of the Interior reported 22 protests in this period.
The French Ministry of the Interior released a report showing a 13% increase in anti-LGBTI offences in 2023, with assaults, threats, and harassment rising by 19%, totalling 2,870 cases. The country chapter for France this year lists numerous homo- and transphobic attacks, including two transfemicides. Similarly, Italy recorded a troubling increase in bias-motivated violence in 2024.
Governments are actively fuelling anti-LGBTI sentiment, often followed by legislative proposals restricting freedom of expression, association, and fair elections. In seven countries across the region, so-called ‘LGBT propaganda’ laws, which seek to criminalise LGBTI visibility, ban content, silence activists, and restrict freedom of assembly, were either discussed, proposed, or adopted.
In Kazakhstan, parliamentarians proposed including “LGBT propaganda” in the list of extremist crimes under the Criminal Code, with penalties of up to seven years’ imprisonment. In Romania, a draft law was introduced to censor LGBTI issues in schools, the media, and public spaces, also seeking to ban Pride marches and related public assemblies.
The most far-reaching of such laws came into force in Georgia last December. The “Protection of Family Values and Minors” law prohibits non-heterosexual people from adopting children, prevents
trans and intersex people from changing their gender markers on documents, outlaws public gatherings that promote same-sex relationships, and bans educational institutions from presenting what the government terms “LGBTI propaganda”. It also prohibits legal gender recognition, criminalises medical procedures related to transitioning, equates same-sex relationships with incest, and designates 17 May as a “Day of Family Purity and Respect for Parents”.
Other countries have focused on targeting the education sector, restricting or outright banning LGBTI topics from curricula and awareness-raising initiatives. In Hungary, teachers fear mentioning SOGIESC (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression, and Sex Characteristics) topics in classrooms due to the anti-LGBTI law—a fear that has now spread across the region.
Similarly, access to trans-specific healthcare, particularly for minors, has been a major target in 2024. Politicians and governments have exploited trans healthcare as a campaign issue. For instance, Austria’s Chancellor and ÖVP leader proposed banning hormone treatments for under-18s without medical justification and included this in the party’s election manifesto. In Germany, the CDU pledged in its election manifesto to repeal the newly enacted legal gender recognition law. Following the UK Cass Review, barriers to trans healthcare have intensified in France, Italy, Ireland, Poland, the UK, Andorra, Georgia, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, and Russia, placing trans lives at further risk.
Governments are increasingly adopting Russian-style tactics, forcing human rights NGOs to register as ‘foreign agents’ to undermine their legitimacy, restrict funding, and stifle human rights activism. In 2024, Bulgaria, Georgia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, and Montenegro proposed or adopted foreign agent laws, posing a direct threat to civil society. In Russia and Turkey, human rights defenders are already labelled as foreign agents or state threats.
As an increasing number of governments crack down on fundamental rights, LGBTI people are being forced to flee persecution, even within Europe and Central Asia. Yet, many European countries are denying asylum claims based on inadequate assessments of country situations or arbitrary credibility judgements. In Germany and Ireland, for example, several LGBTI asylum seekers from Ghana were denied asylum despite facing significant threats to their lives.
Despite these challenges, LGBTI activists remain resilient. They continue to organise Prides, provide support for the most vulnerable, and fill gaps in essential services, such as homelessness support and humanitarian aid in Ukraine. Progress is still being made: Germany has adopted legal gender recognition based on self-determination, workplace protections have been strengthened, and sexual orientation and gender identity have been included in educational curricula in Czechia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Switzerland.
While governments scapegoat LGBTI people and introduce restrictive laws, courts across Europe are upholding LGBTI human rights, issuing key rulings on asylum procedures, hate speech, freedom of expression and association, legal gender recognition, and sexual and reproductive rights. However, political leaders must not rely solely on courts to protect human rights.
This report underscores a global trend: the normalisation of anti-LGBTI rhetoric is a direct assault on the democratic principles that underpin our societies. Political leaders at both the European and national levels must act decisively to counter these growing attacks on democracy.
Click here to download the 2025 Annual Review, see our trends analysis, or search by country, theme, or institution.
