The coming together of three of my passions – The Labour
Party, LGBTI rights, and the countries of South East Europe. This
conference/workshop was a follow up from one held in Belgrade last year.
Initiated by the European Forum for Democracy and Solidarity, and hosted by the
Labour Party through the Westminster Foundation for Democracy; this session
sought to provide practical aims and objectives for delegates, from the social
democratic sister parties of the region, to pursue further LGBTI rights.
To put LGBTI rights in context of the countries of South
East Europe, one only needs to look at ILGA Europe’s ‘Rainbow Europe Map’. The
range amongst all the countries of the former Yugoslavia sees Croatia place 10th
and Macedonia 39th out of the 49 countries of Europe. And this is
solely on legislative terms. The attitude of society towards LGBTI people is
overwhelmingly negative, and is hardening.
So the objectives for the conference delegates –
representing Bosnia & Hercegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia,
Slovenia and Vojvodina; as well as leads on LGBTI groups from Sweden and the
Netherlands – were threefold.
First, the delegates had to contextualize the struggle for
LGBTI rights. This came from speaking about their experience of furthering
LGBTI rights both in society and within the party, the uneven passing of LGBTI
legislation across the countries in the region and its relation to EU
accession, and learning from the experiences of LGBTI social democratic groups
in Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK.
Second, the delegates had to analyse and evaluate the
successes and failures of integrating LGBTI rights into their social democratic
parties. Here, breaking into three groups helped each group focus on one or two
countries at a time, but allowing the entire delegation to pick out differences
and similarities during the roundup at the end.
Third, the delegates had to then draw together an action
plan for them to take practical steps to further LGBTI rights.
Throughout the conference, many shared observations were
made. One of the agents of change in advancing LGBTI rights that was mentioned was
the EU. Delegates commented that the EU guided the hand of Governments into
passing legislation, even if only as a ‘box ticking’ exercise. Governments
could easily ‘blame’ the EU on the need to pass these changes in order to
achieve the overarching objective to join the EU. However, these changes have
not yet acted as an agent of change in society.
Another observation was that the party leadership’s seemed
to be positive towards the LGBTI community in most countries, but it was the
middling and lower ranking membership of those parties that had a problem of
accepting LGBTI rights. However, it was pointed out that future leaders and
representatives of the parties were where delegates could exert pressure to further
LGBTI rights, both in the culture of the party and future party policy. The
youth sections were agreed as a starting point to entrench political education
on LGBTI rights and increase activism.
And so it followed that many delegates agreed there seemed
to be no comprehension amongst party members or some leaders as to how or why
LGBTI rights were central to the values of social democracy. This turned into a
debate on the meaning of social democracy, which the delegates would take back
to their parties.
The lack of leaders, local and national, to either come out
as LGBTI or be pro-LGBTI was a constant weakness most delegates raised,
especially from Macedonia. Lack of visibility meant there was a lack of
seriousness to accept the LGBTI agenda, as it is seen as an electoral negative
rather than a potential electoral positive. Those contributors not from the
region emphasised the parallel processes of greater visibility meaning greater
social acceptance – and hence less electoral disadvantage.
The conference ended after delegates from each country
agreed to small, achievable steps to take. These included arranging a meeting
with the leader of their party, asking for a safe space in Headquarters for
LGBTI members to meet, asking for an email to go out to all party members to
make them aware of the existence of an LGBTI party group, setting up a Facebook
group, and looking towards future local government elections to develop
cost-free pro-LGBTI policies.
The success of this conference will be seen in the actions
that these individual delegates take. As I said in my remarks at the start of
one of the sessions, they are the founders of the LGBTI rights movements in
their parties, and through those they will change laws and societies, and
continue the march towards LGBTI equality. A heavy burden for them to shoulder,
but one this conference motivated them to lead.
