The event, organised by Ilga-Europe, a gay-rights NGO, on Wednesday highlighted the gap between life in Poland and the EU values it is meant to espouse. Brussels to WarsawĬhaber spoke to EUobserver shortly before flying home to Warsaw after attending a gay-rights fundraiser in Brussels.
Polish courts recently ruled that a firm was wrong to refuse to print a pro-LGBTI banner, but Zbigniew Ziobro, the Polish justice minister, has criticised the verdict and promised to intervene. It helps gay people fight other forms of discrimination, but this can also be an uphill struggle. KPH helps gay people to prosecute attackers, but there is no such thing as a homophobic crime in Polish law. People can be out, but they probably wouldn’t walk hand-in-hand in the street … but in other parts of the country, people can’t come out at work, they rarely tell their parents, it’s very difficult to come out in schools, and they don’t have any meeting spaces”, Chaber said. Gdansk, Lodz, Krakow, Poznan, Warsaw, and Wroclaw were “islands” of toleration, Chaber said.
