Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said that he opposed “giving the green light to denigrate the family” as he commented on a bill aiming to repeal a decade-old law that designates information about same-sex relations as harmful to children.
The Lithuanian parliament, Seimas, is on Tuesday planning to table amendments to the Law on the Protection of Minors.
“Allowing or giving the green light to denigrate the family is unacceptable to me altogether. I think I have answered clearly enough,” the president told reporters in Pakruojis, North Lithuania, when asked whether he would veto the amendments.
The amendments drafted by the government remove the provision that says information that “denigrates family values, promotes a different concept of marriage and family formation from that enshrined in the Constitution and the Civil Code” as harmful to children and minors.
Further reading
Critics of the current regulation argue that the current law censors information about LGBTQ+ families in general.
The planned amendments follow the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that Lithuania’s law violates the freedom of expression.
Further reading
The Strasbourg court delivered the judgment in the case of the now deceased author Neringa Macatė whose book of children’s stories was suspended quoting the Protection of Minors Law.
The collection, which included a story about same-sex romantic relations, was published by the Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences in 2013. The publisher suspended the distribution of the book a few months later, after receiving a clarification from the Office of the Inspector of Journalist Ethics stating that Macatė’s book was harmful to children under 14. The office then said its was merely following existing regulations.
The Law on the Protection of Minors and attempts to change it have been divisive in the Lithuanian parliament, alongside moves to ratify the Istanbul Convention and introduce same-sex civil partnership. All these legislative initiatives are expected to reach the parliament this session.
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