BY NATASHA BARSOTTI – A report on gazeta.ru says a Moscow city court has upheld a ruling banning gay pride parades for the next 100 years.
The Tverskoi district court had previously ruled that Moscow authorities’ decision to prohibit gay public events from March 2012 to May 2112 was legal.
According to the report, gay rights activist Nikolai Alexeyev said a loophole was found in legislation that did not set limits on the timeframe for seeking approval for mass public events. Alexeyev says activists then bombarded Moscow city authorities with 102 applications to stage Pride parades over the next century.
Alexeyev said there was no expectation that the parade applications would be approved. Rather, the idea was to generate a case that they could then appeal to a higher court in Russia, and if that failed, take the matter to the European Court of Human Rights.
“We wanted to see the reaction so we could show the European Court of Human Rights that it’s not just past events which are banned illegally but also the future events,” Alexeyev told Gay Star News.”It was a way for us to show the absurdity of the system for gaining permission for public events,” he added.
Pride events, not to mention queer rights, are under siege in the region, as reflected in the incremental passage of anti-gay gag laws in Russian cities and in the attempt to pass similar legislation in Ukraine.
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