Just a few days ago in Berlin, a Pride celebration ended in tragedy when a violent attack left one person dead and twenty-nine others injured. In Romania, municipal authorities banned Oradea Pride and fined participants and organisers.
Meanwhile, police crackdowns on Istanbul’s march – banned since 2015 – have become systematic, and violence threatens marches in Serbia.
As the rapporteur and co-drafter of the 2006 Yogyakarta Principles – the international legal initiative that applied universal human rights to the lived realities of LGBTI people – and now as Strasbourg-based Council of Europe Commissioner for human rights, I see these events not as isolated acts.
They are symptoms of a systemic rollback across the continent, signalling growing intolerance as well as a retreat on the part of some governments.
In a world where the universality of human rights is increasingly contested, our governments must ask themselves a fundamental question: do they still believe that human rights belong to everyone?
