Gay laws in russia

The outcry from human rights activists was swift. Some groups staged disruptive protests, 3 while others used the fast-approaching Sochi Olympics to invite pressure from supranational bodies, governments, corporations, and civil society, directed toward urging Russia to repeal the law.

Some of the first efforts to restrict gay advocacy in the name of child protection arose in the United States and United Kingdom, 6 and many of these laws remain on the books. Russia has adopted the law banning propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors, but these are completely different things.

Russia makes first convictions for ‘LGBT extremism’ following ban

Activists dismissed this distinction, arguing that protecting children is a flimsy justification to crack down on LGBT individuals. Recent decisions by supranational bodies have done little to relieve this tension, in part because they have failed to grasp the most central interests at stake when child-protective laws are introduced: the rights of children themselves.

In Part I, I chart the way in which the idea of a tension between protecting children and respecting sexual rights became firmly entrenched in human rights jurisprudence. Finally, in Part III, I argue that adjudicatory bodies have overlooked the already-recognized rights of children themselves—rights that tip the balance in favor of sexual rights claimants.

Such an assessment makes apparent that child-protective restrictions on sexual rights cannot withstand scrutiny by any institution that takes seriously contemporary human rights guarantees. Proponents of laws restricting LGBT advocacy have used child-protective rationales before, insisting that the moral and physical development of minors requires careful circumscription of discussions of homosexuality and gender nonconformity.

Opponents have portrayed these laws as thinly veiled assaults on LGBT rights, 14 but child-protective arguments in fact had meaningful support in human rights jurisprudence of the s and s. The initial challenges to child-protective laws established the principle that states enjoy some discretion in fulfilling their human rights commitments in particular areas, including morality, and the repercussions of these arguments resonate in the present day.

The result in Handyside was not an aberration. Just six years later, the HRC reached a similar conclusion in Hertzberg v. There is no universally applicable common standard. Consequently, in this respect, a certain margin of discretion must be accorded to the responsible national authorities.

The Committee finds that it cannot question the decision of the responsible organs of the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation that radio and TV are not the appropriate forums to discuss issues related to gay laws in russia, as far as a programme could be judged as encouraging homosexual behaviour.

In particular, harmful effects on minors cannot be excluded. In Hertzberg and Handysidethen, influential human rights bodies recognized that states have an interest in protecting children and determined that this interest in child protection outweighed the expressive rights of adults with regard to public information about sex and sexuality.

In the s and s, child-protective rationales for restrictions on LGBT advocacy were not simply plausiblebut decisive as a matter of human rights doctrine. Both decisions suggested supranational bodies were prepared to give wide latitude to states where issues of moral—which usually meant sexual—regulation were concerned.

When Handyside and Hertzberg were decided, sexual rights were virtually unrecognized as a category of human rights law. It is sometimes assumed that later sexual rights decisions implicitly repudiated Handyside and Hertzbergby virtue of removing morality from the sole purview of states and exposing it to supranational scrutiny.

Handyside continues to be cited by the ECtHR, 27 and the issues Handyside and Hertzberg decided are in many ways broader than the narrow sodomy law question posed by ToonenDudgeonand Norris. Recent decisions on child-protective laws, which I discuss below, have underscored the unresolved questions in these lines of canonical human rights cases.

Collectively, the cases establish a strong right to sexual privacy, but they potentially leave states a wide berth to regulate public expressions of sexuality, particularly when children may witness them. The bodies have, however, addressed other regional and municipal child-protective laws, also passed in Russia.

These decisions — Alekseyev v. Russia and Fedotova v. Both cases suggest supranational bodies rely too heavily on the presentation of empirical proof, and illustrate the importance of a more holistic analysis. In Alekseyev v. Switzerlandwhere the display of obscene artwork justified restrictions of expression, in part because the artwork would be visible to the public without any age limit.

Such a consensus narrowed the margin of gay laws in russia afforded to Russia and justified supranational review. Shortly after Alekseyevthe HRC confronted the regional law prohibiting homosexual propaganda in the Russian oblast of Ryazan. In Fedotova v.