In a matter of hours last August, Bulgarian legislators rushed through changes to the country’s national education act to ban so-called LGBTQ “propaganda” in schools.
The new law caught human rights groups and the Bulgarian public by surprise. Similar amendments had been proposed before but didn’t go anywhere. This time, the proposal moved with breakneck speed, advancing from the committee stage to the final vote in one week before the summer recess. It has been in effect since the school year started in September.
In a matter of hours last August, Bulgarian legislators rushed through changes to the country’s national education act to ban so-called LGBTQ “propaganda” in schools.
The new law caught human rights groups and the Bulgarian public by surprise. Similar amendments had been proposed before but didn’t go anywhere. This time, the proposal moved with breakneck speed, advancing from the committee stage to the final vote in one week before the summer recess. It has been in effect since the school year started in September.
The law echoes discriminatory Russian legislation—first passed more than a decade ago—that used children and education as conduits for labelling the existence of LGBTQ peoples as “propaganda.” And its passage poses fundamental questions about what violations the European Union will allow to its foundational promise of human rights.
Bulgaria now joins Hungary as the second EU member state to use a national law to target its LGBTQ community. In recent years, lawmakers in Slovakia and Poland have also introduced similarly restrictive legislation focused on what can be taught in schools.
Specifically, the amendment to Bulgaria’s Preschool and Education Act prohibits “carrying out propaganda, promoting and inciting in any way, directly or indirectly, ideas and views related to nontraditional homosexual orientation and/or determination of gender identity other than the biological.”
An additional text passed in tandem explicitly defines “nontraditional sexual orientation” as “different from the generally accepted and embedded in the Bulgarian legal tradition concept of emotional, romantic, sexual, or sensual attraction between persons of opposite sexes.”
Although the definition of a “traditional” relationship is narrow, the interpretation of the rest of the law is broad, raising concerns of legalized harassment; self-censorship; and forced changes to science, psychology, and literature curricula. In a survey of Bulgarian schoolchildren published in 2020, 70.6 percent of LGBTQ students said they had been verbally harassed in the prior year. This fall, students feared increased bullying because of the new law.
There were two consecutive days of protests in August immediately following the parliamentary vote. A petition urging the President Rumen Radev to veto the law was signed by more than 7,000 people in 24 hours, but Radev—an independent whose politics follow those of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, a direct descendent of the Soviet-era Bulgarian Communist Party that is still in step with Russia—signed the bill into law.
Multiple pathways exist at the national and EU level to roll back the law but require the political will to follow them. Nationally, Bulgaria’s latest parliament—elected in October after the seventh elections in less than four years—could choose to overturn the bill. This is unlikely, given that the makeup of the current parliament is similar to the last one. Revival, the nationalist and pro-Russia party that proposed the anti-LGBTQ bill, is now the third-largest group in parliament.
There’s also the possibility of petitioning the country’s constitutional court, whose members could rule that it violates the Bulgarian constitution guaranteeing equality and the freedoms of expression, education, and receiving information.
The EU, which Bulgaria joined in 2007, has the power to deny funds and initiate penalizing legal procedures for member states. These actions would align with its stated ideals, but they haven’t been invoked yet—a marked contrast to when Hungary passed its own anti-LGBTQ law in 2021 and was swiftly condemned by the EU. At the time, the bloc froze 700 million euros in funding, contingent on the law being repealed. And there is currently a case at the Court of Justice—brought by the European Commission, European Parliament, and 16 member states—arguing that the Hungarian law discriminates against LGBTQ Hungarians. Specifically, the plaintiffs are arguing that the law violates Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union, which guarantees equality and respect for human rights. The court case is the first time that this accusation has been brought against a member state.
Calculations by Reclaim, a Brussels-based human rights nongovernmental organization, found that more than 650 million euros ($680.8 million) in EU funding could be blocked for Bulgaria, similarly to Hungary, until the law is undone. The Bulgarian law breaches the same EU-defined human rights that are being argued at the Court of Justice. Deystvie, which provides pro bono legal assistance to Bulgaria’s LGBTQ community, is documenting the impact of the law for possible future cases.
“This is a very bureaucratic Union,” Deystvie cofounder and human rights lawyer Denitsa Lyubenova said. “But there are means to counteract what’s happening in Europe.”
The leverage of EU mechanism within Bulgaria remains uneven. Over the past four years, the nation’s politicians have been willing to shrug off or actively oppose EU funds to gain domestic political points. Earlier this fall, a parliamentary debate over EU-mandated energy reforms ended with MPs from Revival and another populist party ripping out microphone cables and stopping two critical votes. The action, which MPs used as part of their election campaign, contributed to a likely loss of more than 1 billion euros in the EU’s Recovery and Resilience funds.
On the topic of LGBTQ rights, Bulgaria already has a track record of ignoring rulings from both of Europe’s higher courts. Last year, Bulgaria’s Supreme Administrative Court refused to issue a birth certificate to a child with two mothers despite a 2021 Court of Justice of the European Union ruling requiring it. Bulgaria doesn’t recognize same-sex unions and recently banned gender changes to legal documents, putting it out of step with case law at the European Court of Human Rights, which rules for the broader 46 members of the Council of Europe.
The violations aren’t seen as negative to some Bulgarians because “they don’t look at the EU law as a constitution or as something that they value,” said Iliana Boycheva, a legal analyst with the Sofia-based Center for the Study of Democracy. “So this does not disappoint [them].”
Some EU parliamentary groups have made statements on the matter. The body’s equality commissioner announced that she’ll be looking into the Bulgarian law’s legality, although her role will be eliminated in the next European Parliament. At a November parliamentary discussion about legislation targeting LGBTQ communities, commissioners noted Bulgaria’s recent law; Dutch MP Raquel García Hermida-Van Der Walle went as far as to say the law is a cover for corruption and called for “immediate action towards Bulgaria and any other country breaking down our fundamental freedoms.”
The bigger players, though, have been mysteriously quiet. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the Hungarian law “a shame” in 2021 but hasn’t spoken out against the Bulgarian law.
Overall, the EU over the past twelve months has taken a rightward and more nationalist shift. Leaders such as von der Leyer—who want to maintain a centrist position—tend to follow.
But Hungary and Bulgaria have been treated differently by the EU since before the parliamentary elections. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been narratively established as a villain, and the bloc is often swift to condemn his actions. Former Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who governed until 2021 and still holds considerable power as the GERB party leader and a member of parliament, oversaw Bulgaria’s efforts to bankroll the TurkStream pipeline that gave Russian gas an essential transport route, as well as what many say is a corrupt court system. Borisov’s GERB party sits with von der Leyen as part of the center-right European People’s Party, and she flew to Bulgaria to campaign alongside him ahead of this summer’s EU elections.
Borisov, along with most GERB representatives present, voted in favor of the anti-LGBTQ law.
The Bulgarian law and the broader EU response is about LGBTQ rights, but it’s also about geopolitics, said Remy Bonny, the executive director of Forbidden Colors, whose advocacy work includes pushing for the lawsuit against Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ bill. “A lot of the backlashes that we have seen, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, on LGBTQ+ rights—they have always been going hand in hand with democratic backlashes as well.”
The current moment, Bonny said, can be traced back to Russia targeting its LGBTQ community in 2013, in part to push back against civil rights progress in the form of marriage equality in much of Europe. In the years since, Russia “has been abusing the topic of LGBTQ+ rights to polarize and destabilize the European Union,” Bonny added.
“This should be one of the largest wake-up signs for human rights that we’ve seen in the last decade,” he said. “The fact that the Russian legislation against LGBTQ+ people is able to be passed without serious sanctions—that’s saying a lot.”
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