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Protests for more gay rights in St. Petersburg (archive image)
Photo: Dmitry Lovetsky / AP
Moscow has declared Russia's main LGBTQ support group a "foreign agent."
The LGBT-Set association has now been included in the relevant register of the Ministry of Justice.
The group was founded in 2006 and is active in several regions of Russia.
According to its own statements, it supports lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people as well as their families.
She also campaigns for clarification and collected evidence of cases of discrimination.
As of this year, dozens of journalists and some independent media outlets in Russia have been classified as "foreign agents."
This obliges them to disclose all of their sources of income and to mark all of their publications.
In February LGBT-Set announced the arrest of two Chechens, who were subsequently brought to Chechnya.
Human rights groups accuse the authorities there of imprisoning homosexuals and torturing them in secret prisons.
The abbreviation LGBTQ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer in English.
Homophobia is widespread in Russia.
There have been repeated brutal attacks against homosexuals there in the past.
In a survey by the state polling institute WZIOM in 2015, 80 percent of those questioned rejected same-sex marriage.
In 2013, a law was passed in the country that criminalizes positive statements about homosexuality.
There has long been international protest against this law against "homosexual propaganda" signed by Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2017: Russia is violating fundamental rights with the ban.
It is discriminatory - and scientifically completely unfounded.
Since a constitutional reform in 2020, gay marriage has been banned in Russia.
as / AFP