The European Commission on Wednesday said all European Union countries should ban so-called conversion therapy.

The recommendation comes weeks after the European Parliament voted in favor of prohibiting the widely discredited practice across the EU. More than 1.2 million people signed a campaign in support of the ban that ACT (Against Conversion Therapy) LGBT launched in 2024 through the EU’s European Citizens Initiative framework.

“We warmly welcome today’s commitment from the European Commission to a recommendation on ending conversion practices, an important step forward for LGBTI rights across Europe,” said ILGA Europe in a statement.

Seven EU countries — Belgium, Cyprus, France, Malta, Norway, Portugal, and Spain — have banned conversion therapy outright.

Greece in 2022 banned the practice for minors. German lawmakers in 2020 passed a law that prohibits conversion therapy for minors and for adults who have not consented to undergoing the widely discredited practice.

ILGA Europe said the European Commission’s recommendation “highlights how much work remains to be done.”

“Ending conversion practices cannot stop at symbolic commitments or fragmented national approaches,” stressed the advocacy group. “We need coordinated EU action, proper training for professionals, and survivor-centered support systems that recognize the serious harm these practices cause.”

“More than one million people supported the European Citizens’ Initiative calling for change,” added ILGA Europe. “The message is clear: conversion practices are not therapy or belief, they are a form of violence that Europe can and should end.”

The Polish government on Tuesday said it will recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in other European Union states.

The EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg last November ruled in favor of a same-sex couple who challenged Poland’s refusal to recognize their German marriage. Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court in March reaffirmed the decision.

The couple, who lives in Poland, brought their case to Polish courts in 2019. The Supreme Administrative Court referred it to the EU Court of Justice.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Tuesday apologized to same-sex couples for the “years of rejection and humiliation” they suffered because Poland did not recognize their relationships.

“I hope that after the ruling of the (European Union) court and the Supreme Administrative Court, we will also find swift and necessary legislative solutions in parliament,” said Tusk, according to TVP, Poland’s public broadcaster.

Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, a member of Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition party, who supports LGBTQ rights, said his city will begin to recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in other EU countries before the national government does. Tusk, for his part, said this recognition is “no way a path to the possibility of adoption.”

Any marriage recognition bill that MPs pass will go to President Karol Nawrocki, who is a socially conservative Catholic, for his signature.

“We welcome these decisions and announcements with hope,” said the Campaign Against Homophobia, a Polish LGBTQ advocacy group. “The true confirmation of these words, however, will be the signing of the aforementioned regulation and the actual certificates held in the hands of those Polish couples who were forced to fight for their dignity and justice before Polish courts.”

Karolina Gierdal, a lawyer with Lambda Warszawa, another Polish LGBTQ rights organization, criticized Tusk’s adoption comments.

“It is sad that the LGBT community is once again presented as a threat, as if society needs reassurance that adoption rights ‘won’t happen.’” she told TVP. “The reality is that children are already being raised in same-sex families in Poland, and maintaining the current legal situation means reducing the level of legal protection available to those children.”

Jonathan David Muir Burgos is 16-years-old, and that fact alone should force the world to stop and pay attention. He is not an armed criminal, nor a violent extremist, nor someone accused of harming others. He is a Cuban teenager who ended up behind bars after joining recent protests in the city of Morón, in the province of Ciego de Ávila, demonstrations born out of exhaustion, desperation, and the growing collapse of daily life across the island.

Those protests did not emerge from privilege or political theater. They erupted after prolonged blackouts, food shortages, lack of drinking water, unbearable heat, and a level of public frustration that continues to deepen inside Cuba. People took to the streets because ordinary life itself has become increasingly unbearable. Families are surviving for hours and sometimes days without electricity. Parents struggle to find food. Entire communities live trapped between scarcity and silence.

Jonathan became part of that reality.

And today, he is sitting inside a Cuban prison.

The World Health Organization defines adolescence as the stage between approximately 10 and 19 years of age, a period marked by emotional, psychological, and physical development. That matters deeply here because Jonathan is not simply a “young protester.” He is a minor. A teenager still navigating the fragile years in which identity, emotional stability, and personal growth are being formed.

Yet the Cuban government chose to place him inside a high-security prison alongside adults.

There is something profoundly disturbing about a political system willing to expose a 16-year-old boy to the psychological brutality of prison life simply because he exercised the right to protest. A prison is never only walls and bars. It is fear, humiliation, emotional pressure, intimidation, and uncertainty. For a teenager surrounded by adult inmates, those dangers become even more alarming.

The situation becomes even more serious because Jonathan reportedly suffers from severe dyshidrosis and has previously experienced dangerous bacterial infections affecting his health. His condition requires proper medical care, hygiene, and adequate treatment, precisely the kind of stability that is difficult to guarantee inside the Cuban prison system.

Behind this story there is also a family living through a kind of pain impossible to fully describe.

Jonathan is the son of a Cuban evangelical pastor. Behind the headlines there is a mother wondering how her child is sleeping at night inside a prison cell. There is a father trying to hold onto faith while imagining the emotional and physical risks his teenage son may be facing behind bars. Faith does not erase fear. Faith does not prevent parents from trembling when their child is imprisoned.

And this is where another painful contradiction emerges.

While a Cuban pastor watches his son remain incarcerated, there are still political and religious voices outside Cuba romanticizing the Cuban regime from a safe distance. There are people who speak passionately about justice while remaining silent about political prisoners, repression, censorship, and now even the imprisonment of adolescents.

That silence matters.

Because silence protects systems that normalize abuse.

For too long, parts of the international community have spoken about Cuba through ideological nostalgia while refusing to confront the human cost paid by ordinary Cubans. The reality is not romantic. The reality is families surviving in darkness, young people fleeing the country in massive numbers, parents struggling to feed their children, and now a 16-year-old boy sitting inside a prison after joining a protest born from desperation.

No government has the moral right to destroy the emotional and psychological well-being of a teenager for exercising freedom of expression. No ideology should stand above human dignity. And no institution that claims to defend justice should remain indifferent while a child becomes a political prisoner.

Jonathan David Muir Burgos should not be in prison.

A 16-year-old boy should not have to pay for protest with his freedom.