At the beginning of December, Youth LGBT Organization Deystvie, in collaboration with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, organized a roundtable called LGBTI RIGHTS IN ACTION to commemorate the International Human Rights Day and in celebration during November 2019 of the 30-year anniversary of the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The event gathered around 60 representatives of institutions, the media, organizations and people from the community. The first part included presentation of the National LGBTI Legal Program financed by the Active Citizens Bulgaria Fund under the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism, the summary report of the work of the Legal Program between 2014 and 2018 and the plan for expanding Deystvie’s National LGBTI Legal Program.
37 filed cases, 126 legal consultations given, more than 1000 people informed about the Legal Program. This is just a part of the results the Program has achieved between 2014 and 2018. The Program continues to offer free consultations and legal aid to LGBTI people, their partners, families and their children, victims of hate crime, discrimination and other incidents with discriminatory motive based on sexual orientation or gender expression, while also expanding its outreach to Veliko Tarnovo, Varna, Burgas and Plovdiv.
The activist Misha Tomasov from the Russian Federation took part in the event, presenting a comparative analysis of the rights of LGBTI people in Bulgaria, Georgia and Serbia, prepared by him and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom.
The second part was a roundtable discussing many questions representatives of the LGBTI community had regarding family rights, inheritance, parenting rights in homosexual couples, etc., with experts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, UNICEF, the Commission for Protection Against Discrimination and the Office of the Ombudsman of the Republic of Bulgaria tried to answer.
People in the audience also participated by giving personal examples and asking questions about how they could be solved. The roundtable was concluded with a discussion about the Constitutional Court’s judgment on the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence and the recent ‘gender hysteria’ aimed mainly at the rights of LGBTI people in Bulgaria and how the latter affected our lives in 2019.
The event was moderated by Mrs. Irina Nedeva, journalist from the Bulgarian National Radio and Chairperson of the AEJ.
The National LGBTI Legal Program project is realized with financial support from Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway through the EEA Financial Mechanism.
The Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom begun it operations in support of the democratic changes in Bulgaria in 1990. For almost 30 years, it has worked to strengthen the rule of law and protect human rights. It is the first German political foundation to support Bulgaria’s democratic transition after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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