The Council of Europe has criticized Russia’s political and religious leadership for promoting homophobia. Homophobic and anti-transgender and racist hate speech is widespread among politicians and clergy and remains unpunished, according to a report by the Council of Europe’s Anti-Discrimination Committee (ECRI), which covers findings from 2012 to mid-2018.
The experts also criticize the text for a 2013 Russian law amendment prohibiting the education of minors about „non-traditional sexual relations“. This hinders the work of groups that support lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people. The information ban must be abolished, the group demands. In addition, the government in Moscow should publish all the findings on the possible mass arrest and ill-treatment of homosexuals in Chechnya in 2017.
The ECRI experts also expressed concern that so-called racial profiling was widespread in Russia. This refers to controls, investigations or surveillance, in which people alone because of their outward appearance in the focus of the police. Especially migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus as well as Roma are affected, according to the report. Russia urgently needs to set up a job that will independently handle complaints against the police.
The Strasbourg-based Council of Europe has the task of monitoring human rights in its 47 member states. Various expert groups are working on this to regularly examine the state of affairs in the federal states.
