There surely are, because right-wing backlash is just one side of the coin, the other being the active mobilisation of rights-oriented civil society. Last year we had presidential election and the current president campaigned on an extremely ideological homophobic platform, and he won, which means that politicians and the government now believe that homophobic and transphobic discourse brings popularity.Īre there any reasons for optimism in such a bleak context? We are witnessing more and more hate crimes and incidents around Poland. These are very hard times for the LGBTQI+ community in Poland, because whenever you tune in public TV, read the newspaper, or navigate government websites, you see it being used as a scapegoat. The government also used to blame women’s rights organisations for everything, and now the LGBTQI+ community is being accused of the worse. A few years ago, it was refugees who played this part, and now they are also being targeted once again. I believe that the LGBTQI+ community has become a scapegoat: it is them that the government blames for any problem. The current government is not going to pass any legislation to make the lives of LGBTQI+ people easier. Since 2015 we have witnessed a rise in homophobic and transphobic speech as well as intolerant actions aimed at the LGBTQI+ community. In 2015 the reins of Poland were taken over by a right-wing government and, in my opinion, the government is now using racism, xenophobia and homophobia to divide society. In the last six years there wasn’t any progress at the legislative level so there are plenty of issues that remain unsolved, such as same-sex marriage, special legal procedures for the recognition of trans people’s identities and the prosecution of homophobic speech and hate crimes. The situation for the LGBTQI+ community is really hard and complicated. What is the situation of LGBTQI+ rights in Poland? He is also a member of Justice and Human Rights Committee, the European Union Committee and the Polish delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. CIVICUS speaks with Krzysztof Śmiszek, a member of the Polish Parliament and chair of the Parliament’s Intergroup on LGBTI Rights, the first of its kind in Poland, about the situation of LGBTQI+ rights and activist responses to the anti-rights backlash.īefore entering politics in 2019, Krzysztof had been an activist for almost 20 years.