Poland’s new Department of European Identity seeks to “ban LGBT ideology”

Poland’s government has set up a new Department of European Identity with the aim of protecting “human rights and fundamental freedoms”.

Its head has announced that among his plans is “banning LGBT ideology”, and critics warn that the aim of the body is to pursue a conservative “moral crusade”, including by restricting women’s and LGBT rights.

The new unit, which operates within the prime minister’s chancellery, is led by Michał Wójcik, a minister without portfolio. He is deputy leader of United Poland (Solidarna Polska), the most radical of the three parties in Poland’s ruling coalition.

Ministers from United Poland have been prominently involved in the government’s anti-LGBT campaign, as well as in seeking to withdraw Poland from a European convention against domestic violence. The party’s leader, justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, last night condemned his own government for dropping its threat to veto the EU budget.

According to the government website, the Department of European Identity will seek to defend “human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the constitutional protection of marriage, the family, motherhood and parenthood, and European identity”. It will also protect children’s rights and combat domestic violence.

Wójcik says he has already prepared 20 legislative proposals for the prime minister’s approval. However, the only two specified so far in media reports are “preventing recognition of same-sex marriages concluded abroad and banning LGBT ideology”.

However, Wójcik told Rzeczpospolita that European identity encompasses “not only ideological issues, but also questions of the rule of law and civil liberties”. He will monitor other EU member states for potential violations of those, reports Onet.

The new department has been criticised by opposition MPs and LGBT activists, who see it as a further means for the government to push an agenda that restricts the rights of certain groups.

Hanna Gill-Piątek, an MP from Poland 2050 (Polska 2050), claimed that its aim is actually to “deprive us all of European identity”.

This is a “department of moral crusade”, which seeks to “take away women’s rights and the dignity of LGBT people”, she warned.

Paweł Knut of Campaign Against Homophobia (KPH), an NGO, told Rzeczpospolita that Wójcik’s declarations indicate that, “rather than ‘increasing protection of human rights’, the department will serve as a platform for creating legislation to weaken protection of the rights of LGBT people in Poland”.

Krzysztof Śmiszek, an MP for The Left (Lewica), asked “since when have misogyny, clericalism, and homophobia been part of this [European] tradition?”

Earlier this year, the justice ministry – headed by Ziobro and with Wójcik then as a deputy minister – provided compensation to a district that had lost EU funding due to declaring itself “free from LGBT ideology”.

Ziobro promised to help all districts “harassed in this way by the European Commission for ideological reasons”, saying that they were in fact defending Polish values.

It was also Ziobro and Wójcik’s ministry that initiated the process of seeking to withdraw Poland from the Istanbul Convention, a European treaty on preventing violence against women. Ziobro argued that the convention is in fact being used to “promote LGBT”.

Main image credit: Krystian Maj / KPRM (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Ben Koschalka

Ben Koschalka is a translator and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.