World
Out in the World: LGBTQ news from Europe and Asia
Grindr location services disabled in Olympic Village
FRANCE
The European Court of Human Rights upheld a French law that criminalizes aspects of sex work, in what advocates are calling a “missed opportunity” that will continue to put sex workers’ lives in danger.
In a July 25 ruling, the court found that France’s 2016 law, which criminalizes the purchase of sex and other organizational aspects of sex work, like keeping a brothel, does not violate Section 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of privacy. The court refused to consider whether the law violated other sections of the convention that guarantee the right to life and freedom from torture.
The French law was based on the so-called “Nordic model” of criminalizing sex work, which was pioneered in Sweden and Norway in 1999 and 2009, respectively. The model was meant to discourage prostitution and human trafficking without criminalizing sex workers themselves, who are seen as vulnerable or victims of exploitation.
Advocacy groups have criticized the Nordic model for exposing sex workers to danger and have tended to call for full decriminalization of sex work.
The case was brought by 261 sex workers identified as men and women of various nationalities. The applicants argued that the law made the conditions of being a sex worker more dangerous by making clients wary of being arrested and by preventing sex workers from working together or hiring security. This forced sex workers to meet clients alone and far from the public eye, exposing them to potential violence and clients who refuse to use condoms. It also drove down the prices they could charge for their services.
Still, the court found that France should be given a “margin of appreciation” for its approach to regulate and abolish sex work without actually prohibiting it.
Human rights groups were quick to denounce the ruling.
“This does not change the evidence that the 261 sex workers – the majority of them migrants, women of color, and LGBT people – presented to the European Court of Human Rights,” said Erin Kilbride, LGBT rights director of Human Rights Watch. “Criminalization increases physical attacks, sexual violence, and police abuse of people who sell sex, while having no demonstrable effect on the eradication of human trafficking. The movement for sex workers’ rights is a strong one that will continue the fight to protect the rights and lives of all sex workers.”
Amnesty International, which intervened in the case in support of sex workers, has said the global experience suggests that the French law will endanger sex workers’ lives.
“Our research has highlighted that laws supposedly intended to protect sex workers are in fact putting them at higher risk of abuse and violence, including rape and physical attacks,” said Anna Błuś, Amnesty International’s women’s rights researcher.
“Today’s judgment is a blow to the courageous sex workers who brought this case. We continue to stand alongside sex workers as they demand protection for their human rights and seek justice for rights violations perpetrated against their community.”
GERMANY
The annual Christopher Street Day parade in Cologne saw a record turnout of 1.2 million people on July 21, as Pride events in the country took on new urgency with the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Pride events in Germany are often called “Christopher Street Day” after the street in New York where the Stonewall Inn is found and where the 1969 Stonewall Riots are said to have kick-started the modern LGBTQ rights movement.
The Cologne Christopher Street Day Parade featured more than 60,000 participants and 90 floats, and was kicked off with speeches from prominent German politicians, including Bundestag President Bärbel Bas, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, and Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth. Members of the German pop-rock band Tokio Hotel, including openly gay frontman Bill Kaulitz, also participated on one of the floats.
Despite the celebratory atmosphere, a group of 13 men attempted to disrupt the festivities by shouting right-wing extremist and homophobic remarks and tearing down rainbow flags. Cologne police quickly intervened and detained the men, some of whom were described as between ages 18 and 30, wearing black clothing, bare-chested, and with shaven heads. Police also investigated a threat made against the parade that was posted on the internet the day before but dismissed it as unserious.
The Christopher Street Day Parade in Berlin took place on Saturday and was themed on the organizers’ call for Germany’s Basic Law — its constitution — to be amended to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Basic Law is already interpreted to ban discrimination based on gender identity.
The call for greater protections for LGBTQ rights comes as the AfD, which opposes LGBTQ rights and same-sex marriage, is riding high in opinion polls.
CANADA
The city of Edmonton, Alberta, is honoring its LGBTQ history with a new exhibit at Fort Edmonton Park that runs all summer and spotlights significant people and moments that often go overlooked in official histories.
Fort Edmonton Park is a city-owned living history museum that presents the history of the Edmonton area from the earliest Indigenous communities through the 1920s. Entitled “Regulating Morality,” the new exhibit was constructed by the Edmonton Queer History Project and features key historic events like the AIDS pandemic and the legal and political fights for equal rights and same-sex marriage. The new installation is part of an effort to broaden the type of history being preserved in the park beyond that of the white colonial Christian community.
“We want every visitor that comes here to see themselves reflected in Edmonton’s history, and we can’t do that unless we are creating space to tell these narratives,” said Neil Cramer, public interpretation coordinator at Fort Edmonton Park.
Alberta has been at the center of many of the most important battles for LGBTQ rights in Canada.
Long heralded as the most conservative province of Canada, Alberta politicians bitterly resisted many advances in queer rights. In 1998, an Edmonton school teacher who was fired for being gay won a Supreme Court case that established that nondiscrimination laws must include protections for sexual orientation, after a legal struggle that spanned seven years.
More recently, the premier of Alberta has come under fire for transphobic policies that bar access to gender care for minors and require parental notification and consent if a student wishes to use an alternate name or pronoun in class.
“By knowing you have a past history, you can also imagine a future, and that’s really important in a time that is challenging and difficult right now,” said Kristopher Wells, founder of the Edmonton Queer History Project.
OLYMPICS
The gay cruising app Grindr has disabled location services and a host of other features in the Olympic Village in an effort to protect the privacy of athletes, the company announced in a blog post on July 24.
The move is a response to an incident at the 2016 Rio Olympics when the Daily Beast published an article by reporter Nico Hines about hookup culture among athletes, in which he described several athletes that he identified on Grindr, potentially outing them and exposing them to danger in their home countries where homosexuality is criminalized or not socially acceptable. Grindr took similar steps to protect athletes at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
“If an athlete is not out or comes from a country where being LGBTQ+ is dangerous or illegal, using Grindr can put them at risk of being outed by curious individuals who may try to identify and expose them on the app,” the company said in a blog post.
Grindr users will not be able to use the “Explore” and “Roam” features within the Olympic Village, where the “show distance” feature will also be turned off by default. The app is also allowing users in the Village to send unlimited disappearing messages and unsend messages, disabling screenshots of profile images and chats, and disabling private videos.
“Our goal is to help athletes connect without worrying about unintentionally revealing their whereabouts or being recognized,” the company said.
According to the website Outsports, 175 openly LGBTQ athletes are competing at the Olympics, although only 20 of them are cisgender men.
IRELAND
The Irish government says it may not uphold its pledge to introduce a ban on conversion therapy, saying that the issue has become too complicated to legislate before the end of the government’s term, the Irish Times reports.
A conversion therapy ban was promised as part of the coalition agreement formed between Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party after the 2020 election. But consultations on the ban dragged on for years, and no bill has yet been introduced, despite the government repeatedly saying the bill was a priority during that time.
The next Irish election must be held by March 2025.
Equality and Children Minister Roderic O’Gorman said that legislating on the issue was “extremely complex” at an event at Trinity College in Dublin on July 12, where three professional associations representing psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors committed their members not to engage in conversion therapy. The College of Psychiatrists of Ireland, the Irish Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy, and the Psychological Society of Ireland bans extend to both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K.
O’Gorman says crafting legislation that covers non-medical practices has proven difficult.
“I wanted to make sure it covered quasi-religious practices and quasi-therapeutic practices, and to ensure those very necessary conversations that take place when someone is exploring their gender identity or sexual orientation wouldn’t be impacted,” O’Gorman said.
The Vatican
New Vatican report acknowledges LGBTQ Catholics feel isolated in the church
Document contains testimonies of two gay married men
A report the Vatican released on Tuesday acknowledges LGBTQ Catholics have felt isolated within the church.
The report, which the Vatican’s General Secretariat of the Synod’s Study Group 9 released, includes testimony from two married gay Catholics from the U.S. and Portugal.
“Regarding the resistances — limiting ourselves to those emerging from the lived experiences shared with us — we wish to highlight the following: the solitude, anguish, and stigma that accompany persons with same-sex attractions and their families, not only in society but also within the church; this is often linked to the temptation to hide in a ‘double life,'” reads the report. “Within this problematic outlook lie the positions expressed in the pressure to undergo reparative therapies or, even more gravely, in the simplistic advice to enter the sacrament of marriage.”
“At the root of both the emerging openings and the persisting resistances, it seems possible to identify a difficulty in coordinating pastoral practice and the doctrinal approach. Other testimonies received by our study group from believers with same-sex attractions further confirm how arduous it is for individuals and Christian communities to reconcile “doctrinal firmness” with “pastoral welcome,'” it adds.
The report appears to criticize so-called conversion therapy. It also states “every person, first and foremost, is singular, irreducible, irreplaceable, and original” and “this is the meaning of the Biblical-theological theme of the human being, male and female, created in the image and likeness of God.”
The National Catholic Reporter notes “a group of theologians, including bishops, priests, a sister and a layperson” the Vatican commissioned “to study ‘controversial’ issues that Pope Francis’s Synod on Synodality raised wrote the report.
Francis in 2023 launched the multi-year synod to examine on ways to reform the church.
The Argentine-born pontiff died in April 2025. Pope Leo XIV, who was born in Chicago, succeeded him.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday met with Leo at the Vatican. The meeting took place against the backdrop of increased tensions between the U.S. and the Holy See over the Iran war.
LGBTQ Catholic groups largely welcome report
LGBTQ Catholic groups welcomed the report; even though it will not change church teachings on homosexuality, marriage, and gender identity.
“It was a really bold choice to make LGBTQ issues — or homosexuality — one of the case studies,” Brian Flanagan, a senior fellow at New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based LGBTQ Catholic organization, told the Washington Blade on Wednesday during a telephone interview.
Flanagan is also the John Cardinal Cody Chair of Catholic Theology at Loyola University in Chicago.
“They (the study group) could have punted and said something easier,” he said. “Instead, they’re putting what was frankly one of the hottest issues leading up to and after the Synod and addressing it more head on.”
New Ways Ministry Executive Director Francis DeBernardo in a statement described the report as a “breath of refreshing air, the first acknowledgment that LGBTQ+ issues were taken seriously by the three-year global consultation of all levels of the church.”
“By establishing mechanisms and recommendations to continue dialoguing with LGBTQ+ people, the report is a significant step forward in the church’s process to become a more welcoming place for its LGBTQ+ members,” he said.
Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, an LGBTQ Catholic organization, in her own statement said the report “demonstrates a welcome humility and openness to learning from the People of God about people’s lives and faith journeys.”
“It is clear that the study group members understand that the doctrines of the church undermine the deep relationship with God that many LGBTQ+ people have, or try to have, and that this needs to be corrected,” she said. “Church officials have decades of testimony from people who have found their sexual orientation or gender identity to be a blessing and a gift, and their relationships to be sacred. To see this reality reflected and respected in this document is a long-awaited positive step.”
Duddy-Burke added the report largely ignores “the experiences of transgender and nonbinary people.” She further notes it “provides few concrete recommendations and proposes no doctrinal changes.”
“Rather, it calls for dialogue, encounter, and communal theological reflection to shape how the Catholic Church moves forward in addressing doctrine and pastoral practice,” said Duddy-Burke. “The paradigm shift repeatedly called for in this report is a significant and very welcome change. Experience, especially of those most impacted, must be key to developing dogma.”
Ukraine
Ukrainian MPs advance new Civil Code without protections for same-sex couples
Advocacy groups say proposal would ‘contradict European standards’
Ukrainian lawmakers have advanced a proposed new Civil Code that does not contain legal protections for same-sex couples.
The Kyiv Independent reported the proposal passed on its first reading on April 28 by a 254-2 vote margin.
The newspaper notes more than two dozen advocacy groups in a statement said some of the proposed Civil Code’s provisions “contradict European standards” and “violate Ukraine’s commitments under its EU accession process.”
“The most worrying provisions are those that make it impossible for a court to recognize the existence of a family relationship between people of the same sex,” the statement reads. “This overturns the already established case law on this issue, and closes the only legal avenue that allows partners to somehow protect their rights in individual cases.”
“Moreover, the draft completely ignores the obligations that Ukraine should have already fulfilled as part of its accession to the EU, as it lacks provisions that would allow people of the same sex to register their relationships,” it adds.
“The provisions also stipulate that all marriages concluded by people who have changed their gender automatically become invalid,” the statement further notes. “This is not just stagnation in the field of human rights or lack of progress on the path to European integration, but an actual setback in the legal sphere.”
Olena Shevchenko, chair of Insight, a Ukrainian LGBTQ advocacy group, in an April 28 Facebook post said the new Civil Code “is a step back on upholding the rights of women and the LGBT+ community in Ukraine.”
The Ukrainian constitution defines marriage as between a man and a woman.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2022 publicly backed civil partnerships for same-sex couples.
The Ukrainian Supreme Court on Feb. 25 recognized Zoryan Kis and Tymur Levchuk — a gay couple who has lived together since 2013 and married in the U.S. in 2021 — as a family. Ukraine the day before marked four years since Russia began its war against the country.
Commentary
How do you vote a child out of their future?
Students reportedly expelled from Eswatini schools over alleged same-sex relationships
There is something deeply unsettling about a society that turns a child’s future into a public referendum. In Eswatini, there were reports that students were expelled from school over alleged same-sex relationships, and that parents were invited to vote on whether those children should remain, forcing us to confront a difficult question on when did education stop being a right and become a favor granted by collective approval? Because this is a non-neutral vote.
A vote reflects power, prejudice and personal beliefs, which are often linked to tradition, culture, politics and religion. It is shaped by fear, by stigma, by long-standing narratives about morality and belonging. To ask parents, many of whom may already hold hostile views about LGBTIQ+ people, to decide the fate of children is not consultation. It is deferring the responsibility and repercussion. It is placing the lives of young people in the hands of those most likely to deny them protection.
And where is the law in all of this?
The Kingdom of Eswatini is not operating in a vacuum. It has a constitution that guarantees the promotion and protection of fundamental rights, including equality before the law, equal protection of the laws, and the right to dignity. The constitution further goes on to protect the rights of the child, including that a child shall not be subjected to abuse, torture or other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.
The Children’s Protection and Welfare Act of 2012 extends the constitution and international human rights instruments, standards and protocols on the protection, welfare, care and maintenance of children in Eswatini. The Children’s Protection and Welfare Act of 2012 promotes nondiscrimination of any child in Eswatini and says that every child must have psychosocial and mental well-being and be protected from any form of harm. The acts of this very instance place the six students prone to harm and violence. The expulsion goes against one of the mandates of this act, which stipulates that access to education is fundamental to development, therefore, taking students out of school and denying them education contradicts the law.
Eswatini is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. These are not just commitments made to make our governments look good and appeasing. They are obligations. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is clear regarding all actions concerning children. The best interests of the child MUST be a primary consideration and NOT secondary one. According to the CRC, as indicated in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth.” It is not something to be weighed against public discomfort and popularity.
The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child reinforces this, grounding rights in non-discrimination (Article 3), privacy (Article 10) and protection from all forms of torture (Article 16). Access to education (Article 11) within these frameworks is not conditional but is a foundational right. It is not something that can be taken away because a child is perceived as falling outside social norms and threatening the moral fabric of society. It is a foundational right and determines one’s ability to participate in civic actions with dignity.
So again, where is the law when children are being expelled?
It is tempting to say the law is silent but that would be too generous. The law is not silent rather, it is being ignored and bypassed in favor of systems of decision-making that make those in power comfortable. When schools and their leadership defer to parental votes rather than legal standards, they are not acting neutrally. Expelling a child from school because of allegations is not a decision to be taken lightly. It disrupts education and limits future opportunities and for children already navigating identity and social pressure, this kind of exclusion can have profound psychological effects. It isolates them. It marks them for potential harm. Imagine being a child whose future is discussed in a room where people debate your worth. That is exposure. That is harm. There is a tendency to justify these actions in the language of culture, tradition, religion and protecting social cohesion. But culture is not static and the practice of Ubuntu values is not an excuse to violate rights. If anything, the principle of Ubuntu demands the opposite of what is happening here.
Ubuntu is not about conformity. It is about recognition and is the understanding that our humanity is bound up in one another. That we are diminished when others are excluded. That care, dignity, respect and compassion are not optional extras but central to how we exist together. Where, then, is Ubuntu in a school where some children are deemed unworthy of access to education?
Why are those entrusted with protecting children are failing to do so?
There is a very loud contradiction at play. On one hand, there is a claim to shared values and to the importance of community. On the other hand, there is a willingness to isolate and exclude those who do not fit within the narrow definition of what is acceptable. You cannot have both. A community that thrives on exclusion is neither cohesive nor safe.
It is worth asking why these decisions are being made in this way. Why not follow the established legal processes? Why not ensure that any disciplinary action within schools aligns with national and international obligations? Why introduce a vote at all? The answer is uncomfortable and lies in legitimacy and accountability. A vote creates the appearance of a collective agreement. But again, I reiterate, it distributes responsibility across many hands, making it hard to hold anyone accountable. It allows the school leadership to say “lesi sincumo sebantfu”(“This is what the community decided, not me”) rather than confronting their own role in human rights violations. If the law is clear and rights, responsibilities and obligations are established, then the question is not what the community feels. The question is why those entrusted with protecting children are failing to do so.
There is also a deeper issue here about whose rights are seen as negotiable. When we talk about children, we often speak of care, of understanding, of protection and safeguarding them because they are the future. But that language becomes selective when it intersects with sexuality, particularly when it involves LGBTIQ+ identities. Suddenly, care, understanding, protection, and safeguarding give way to punishment.
Easy decisions are not always just ones.
If the kingdom is serious about its commitments under its constitution, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, then those commitments must be visible in practice, not just in policy documents. Rather, they must guide decision-making in schools and in communities. That means recognizing that a child’s right to education cannot be overridden by a show of hands. It means ensuring that schools remain spaces of inclusion rather than sites of moral policing. It means holding leaders and institutions accountable when they fail to protect those in their care.
Bradley Fortuin is a consultant at the Southern Africa Litigation Center and a human rights activist.
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