About 350 lesbian activists to meet in Kyiv on April 11-14 to discuss their rights and challenges at the second European and Central Asian Lesbian Conference or EL*C.
Ukraine was chosen for the venue as a country which is moving fast to Europe but where the lesbian rights are still limited.
“It would be a test on Ukraine’s Europeanness,” Olena Shevchenko, a Ukrainian member of the EL*C board and head of Insight, Ukraine’s LGBT organization, told the Kyiv Post.
Shevchenko said lesbians, as all other LGBT representatives, are invisible and vulnerable in Ukraine since they have no laws protecting their rights as minorities and no laws punishing for violence against them. Ukraine’s legislation also doesn’t allow LGBT to create families and adopt children.
The same problems lesbians face in the entire region, becoming targeted by the “lesbophobia,” which is now present in the “numerous political debates, such as the discussion on the legalization of medically assisted procreation for lesbians,” the organizers of the conference said in the report.
Shevchenko fears the conference, which will be held in hotel Tourist on Kyiv’s left bank, can be attacked by ultra-right groups.
“Someone broke the windows last night in a hotel and wrote: “LGBT out!” Shevchenko said. The police and National Guard promised to secure the event, she added.
The conference will be devoted to discussions of the anti-gender movements in Ukraine and Europe and also the rights of lesbians, access to services, family rights, social security issues for this group.
Shevchenko said the organizers are expecting the representatives of the European Union, Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. There will be also the delegates from the office of Ukraine’s ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova, as well as from the police and Ministry of Justice.
It will be the second conference like this after the first one was organized in Vienna in October 2017.
This year’s conference will be opened by Monica Benicio, the partner of the LBGT activist Marielle Franco, Brazilian politician, feminist and outspoken critic of extrajudicial killings, who was shot dead in the streets of Rio de Janeiro in March 2018. The killing brought thousands to the streets in Brazil, while the suspects of the murder, arrested in 2019, received the honorable remarks from the Brazilian then president Jair Bolsonaro’s son.
