INTERGROUP INTERVIEW

INGMAR VAN BLOOIS & MAXZ VAN DER HUCHT

 

Evert Jan Jacobsen, working at the secretariat of the European Parliament’s LGBT intergroup, an informal Group of 174 Members of Parliament from all mainstream parties.

Khalid Boufadiss. Assistant to Member of the European Parliament Sophie in ‘t Veld, working on fundamental rights. 

 

Can you explain how it works here, how does it come together?

 

K: With this one, we are trying to get a normal resolution with a commission statement, because we want the commission to support us. Somehow, during the conference of presidents were all the presidents of all the parties , they decided they wanted to have a urgency resolution, which is unfortunately not with a commission statement. But still, the title of the urgency resolution is powerful, but it’s a shame that we don’t have that statement.”

 

So the resolution is purely about making a statement to end political relations?

 

K: Yes, but we wanted to have something more severe. Something more strong. This is still a call to the commission. We are already talking with the commission. And it said that we need a moral imperative of the parliament, could you provide us with this, because than we can add this and say that the parliament wants this. Khalid: it’s a strong statement, has never happened before. So it might takes some time. We already restructured the development aid from the Netherlands to make it go to civil society organisations, away from the Ugandan government.

 

EJ: we are talking with people from UG and NI about what they need.

 

It was never okay to be gay there, but is it going to be worse there? At the moment you make a law like that, the situation doesn’t change. But now it’s legal to bash gay people and lock them up.

 

K: People are encouraged to act against lgbt-people and that’s completely legal out there. Nigeria has similar laws, but Dutch attention goes mostly to Uganda, that’s how it works. 

 

EJ: This difference in attention can partially also be explained by the stronger LGBT organisations in Uganda . In Nigeria this is developed way less.

 

Khalid: Less developed and Nigeria is  more heterogenic. Besides, Nigeria houses one of the biggest Dutch companies, Shell, so Uganda is more easy for the Netherlands to do something about the rights than in Nigeria.

 

If your resolution gets excepted, what will it change in the Netherlands? What are the most important LGBT-issues in Europe?

 

EJ: Freedom of movement is a big issue, because if you’re married in the Netherlands and you move to Italy and you have children, one parent will not be recognised as the parent, while the other one is. This is one of the biggest issues Europe should work on. There is still no horizontal anti-discrimination directive which means that discrimination on the base of sexual orientation is banned in employment, so you cannot be fired because your gay, but you can still be refused a room because of being gay, like in a hotel. There are countries which have laws to forbid this, but there are also countries which don’t have these kind of laws. One very important thing is spreading lgbt-rights abroad, which is a very hot topic in the EU external-relations, for example in third world countries. We don’t do it internally, because when you enter the EU, a country has to fulfil certain criteria like freedom of assembly, etcetera, but we don’t have a real strong enforcing mechanism to block a country if it adopts a law like the Anti gay-propaganda law from Russia.

 

What can youngsters like them contribute?

 

EJ: You have to win the hearts and minds of people and in the Netherlands we succeeded quite well, but there is still a lot of discrimination and people are still afraid of walking hand in hand on the street.

Khalid: it’s very important to be open minded when you’re young, but it’s even more important to stay open minded when you grow older. It’s a shame that people in The Netherlands are becoming more narrow minded, while people were very open minded in the 70’s. Sophie in 't Veld always says that why do we have European rules on money and not on love? When you look at the Netherlands, gender laws are quite outdated and surrounding countries are actually a bit more ahead of us.

 

Which country has the most work to do on lgbt-rights? Is it true that Western-European countries has to do the less on these rights and that Eastern-European countries has to do the most on them?

 

EJ: For example with Croatia, the just adopted a referendum opted by the church, but now, they are going to introduce partnerships for same sex couples. Slovakia doesn’t have it and they want to introduce a similar thing in the constitution to let it be a union between a man and a woman and that’s a bit weird, because people are still fighting against discrimination in Slovakia. In Poland, on the background, there are some very progressive elements going on, the transgender organisation was very involved in drafting a new recognition law. You can be surprised how progressive and surprisingly people can be. I have little hope for Lithuania and Latvia, even though Latvia is very progressive in other human rights and they even won prices with that.

 

How about Russia? It’s a big issue, the anti propaganda law there. What have you done about that?

 

EJ: Every time there is a human right issue between the institutions of Europe (Parliament, commission) and Russia, we take a position and lgbt-rights are always included there. We do this very systematically,  but unfortunately, it doesn’t always help. We also asked for visa liberalisation negotiations to be suspended and that has finally happened now, even though that happened because of the Ukraine. We also want to prohibit people who worked on these so called anti-gay laws to enter the EU. It might work, why wouldn’t it. With this parliament it might work out, because the next parliament will probably be more right wing and conservative than this one.

 

 

FYI: the resolution that we spoke about at the start was adopted, you can find it HERE