The Belgrade Centre for Human Rights supports the holding of the Belgrade Pride 2013 event and calls on all state authorities to enforce the Constitution and laws of the Republic of Serbia conscientiously and ensure that its participants are not deprived of their fundamental human rights, as they have unfortunately been in the past. Persons whose sexual orientation is not heterosexual, i.e. homosexual, bisexual and transgender people, are often victims of various forms of discrimination, including violent ones, in Serbia as well. This event is a legitimate attempt by these people and others who understand the problems they face on a daily basis to highlight these problems. Their endeavours are based on the principles of equality, tolerance, pluralism and the rule of law which any decent state governed by law should abide by. The Belgrade Centre for Human Rights recalls that the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia guarantees the freedom of peaceful assembly to all citizens, regardless of their gender, origin, ethnic or religious affiliation, age or sexual orientation. The state is under the duty to protect participants in a peaceful assembly, even when such an event is offensive to persons whose views differ from those of the participants in the event.
In the event the competent state authorities possess information indicating that there are people or organisations that will try to unlawfully prevent the holding of the event, as was the case with the previous attempts to hold the Pride Parade, they are under the duty to take the measures prescribed by law and penalise such people or organisations. The Belgrade Centre for Human Rights would like to remind the competent state authorities, above all the police and the Republican Prosecutor’s Office, that this duty of theirs applies also to the events accompanying the attempts to hold the Pride Parades in the recent years, all the more since the decisions to ban them were reasoned by security assessments leading to the conclusion that specific individuals were preparing attacks on the Parade participants. Such individuals must be adequately punished because the preparation of a crime is punishable as well.
The Belgrade Centre for Human Rights calls on all citizens to respect the laws of their country and not to jeopardise the constitutionally guaranteed rights of their compatriots, but, rather, support their endeavours to exercise them in accordance with the principle of equality.
