Ukraine considers several ways of overcoming discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, says the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs

Ukrainian authorities work on the measures that should be taken to overcome the discrimination of people with non-traditional sexual orientation. It was the message of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin delivered on the briefing in Kyiv on October 20.

 "We consider several options for overcoming the discrimination [on the grounds of sexual orientation] in the frame of dialogue with the European commission. It can possibly include changing the legislation and implementing corresponding judicial practice, as our Constitution contains provisions about such discrimination being impossible. The Parliament is to decide either this judicial practice will be improved or some changes will be implemented in the corresponding legislation, for example in the Labour Code. The dialogue continues," Klimkin informed.

As we wrote, the EU expert group that evaluated the implementation of actions aimed at visa regime liberalization came to the conclusion that Ukraine did not comply with the recommendations of the European Union regarding the prohibition of discrimination in employment on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Let's recall thatin the end of last year Ministry of the Social Policy published the project of the new Labour Code of Ukraine that had had the prohibition of the discrimination in employment on the grounds of sexual orientation in Article 6, but its amended version had no sexual orientation as well as gender identity in the list of protected characteristics.

Besides, the Constitutional Commission first had expanded the list of anti-discriminatory characteristics that were to be mentioned in the new Constitution project, adding also sexual orientation to it, but later sexual orientation was removed on insistence of the Council of Churches. Due to numerous appeals of human rights activists and foreign representatives, the Commission will consider this once more on the special research and training conference in November.

It should be mentioned that the petition was created on the website of the President of Ukraine that called for sexual orientation and gender identity to be included to the list of anti-discriminatory characteristics of the Constitution project, however only 3900 people voted for it out of necessary 25000.

The protection of LGBT in court can be illustrated by the sentence to the Zhovten arsonists or decision to ban Equality March in Odesa.

Автор: Kolya Camouflage