Belarus is following Russia’s lead in outlawing so-called LGBTQ+ “propaganda.”

On Thursday, the former Soviet republic’s parliament approved a bill making “propaganda of homosexual relations, gender change, refusal to have children, and pedophilia” crimes. Punishment for such offenses would include fines, community labor, and 15 days of detention, the Associated Press reports.

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Cops beat gay couple in their homes as Belarus seeks to mimic Russia’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws

While the country decriminalized homosexuality in 1994, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus lacks basic protections for LGBTQ+ rights. LGBTQ+ rights groups, including TG House, say the community is routinely targeted by the country’s security forces, which have raided nightclubs and private parties and blackmailed LGBTQ+ people into cooperation. In 2022, the AP reported that Belarusian security forces raided the home of a gay couple in Minsk, the country’s capital, brutally beating them.

The country’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, has been pushing for a law similar to Russia’s for years. In 2013, Russia instituted a law banning LGBTQ+ “propaganda” in the presence of children. Nearly a decade later, in 2022, the law was expanded to effectively outlaw all public expressions of LGBTQ+ identity and support for the community. The following year, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a law banning gender-affirming care and denying transgender people the right to marry or adopt children, and the country’s Supreme Court declared the international LGBTQ+ rights movement an “extremist organization.”

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Belarus’ version of the “propaganda” law was first approved by the country’s House of Representatives last month. Lukashenko is expected to sign it into law.

“LGBTQ+ people had faced beatings, arrests, persecution, and mockery even before the bill’s approval,” TG House head Alisa Sarmant told the AP this week, “but now law enforcement agencies have received legal grounds for repression.”

“The Belarusian authorities have lumped together gays, lesbians, transgender people, and pedophiles, creating additional grounds for social rejection and stigmatization,” Sarmant said. “Belarus is copying Russia’s sad experience, creating unbearable conditions for LGBT+ people.”

Russia’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws have resulted in at least one Russian tech company tracking and compiling lists of LGBTQ+ businesses in the country, as well as multiple police raids on gay venues.

Sarmant tells the AP that TG House has documented similar measures in Belarus, including at least 12 cases of anti-LGBTQ+ persecution and one raid on a nightclub in Minsk within the last three months.

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