Gay community in nikšić, montenegro

As the Pride season ends, we look at why Pride events are still so important for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex LGBTI people and activists across the world. Threats, violence and harassment against LGBTI people happen every day, including during Prides. In a number of countries, events cannot go ahead without a heavy police presence. This year, while people were peacefully demonstrating during Pride in Kyiv, Ukraine, counter-demonstrators violently attacked the parade and left 10 people injured.

A separate Gay Pride parade, scheduled for April 24, was banned earlier by police in Niksic on security grounds. The first public LGBT event in Niksic had threatened to attract a significant number of opponents, police said in a statement. During the first Gay Pride march in Podgorica, in October , more than protesters, mostly football hooligans, hurled rocks and bottles at the marchers who only numbered several dozen people. Twenty police were injured in the affray, one of them seriously.

LGBT and student organizations plan to stage a protest walk on Friday in the town of Niksic, protesting over a college ban on a gay rights meeting. The walk will be organized in front of the Faculty of Philosophy in the town of Niksic, where the college administration refused to allow the organization of a public forum on LGBT rights. One of the organizers, the watchdog LGBT Forum Progress, said the public forum had been scheduled for last before the administration banned it. However, a recent survey suggested that over 71 per cent of adults in the country still consider homosexuality an illness.

In a landmark decision, the Constitutional Court of Montenegro found that by upholding the ban of gay pride march in Nikšić, the second largest city in Montenegro, the Montenegrin Supreme Court violated freedom of peaceful assembly, as guaranteed by the Article 52 of the Constitution of Montenegro, Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Constitutional Court adopted the constitutional complaint filed in by the executive director of Human Rights Action HRA , Tea Gorjanc-Prelević, for NGOs LGBT Forum Progres and Hiperion, which were prohibited by the police in to organise a peaceful march to promote rights of sexual and gender minorities pride in Nikšić. The Constitutional Court abolished the judgment of the Supreme Court Uvp. The Constitutional Court found that the state failed to fulfil its positive obligation to secure the gathering based on the international standard of the right to peaceful assembly, regardless of threats by soccer fans and the announced protests of the Yugoslav Communist Party.