GOOD PRACTICES FOR LGBT ACTIVISTS ON ENGAGING WITH LOCAL AND REGIONAL AUTHORITIES

1. GOOD PRACTICES FOR LGBT ACTIVISTS ON ENGAGING WITH LOCAL AND REGIONAL AUTHORITIES Simeon Vasilev Director and Co-Founder GLAS Bulgaria foundation

2. Because of prejudice, discrimination and violence many people in Bulgaria continue to hide their sexual orientation, including from friends and family members. LGBT persons could face violence and hate speech everywhere and this has exceptionally harmful, long lasting effect on the victims. That kind of violence also generates widespread climate of fear among people of the LGBT community, especially when the state fails to bring the perpetrators to justice. This creates a clear distrust in the authorities. Very often the victims do not want to inform the police about the crimes, which leads to impunity of attackers. • There is no official data on the LGBT population in Bulgaria. Moreover since the criminal legislation does not recognize offences committed on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity, there are no relevant statistics on hate speech or hate crime. There have been six publically announced cases in recent years of violence against LGBT persons and only one which resulted in the prosecution and conviction of the perpetrator.

3. Due to these reasons GLAS Foundation started in May 2015 the We Are Tolerant project and social-awareness campaign combating homophobic hate crimes. • The campaign started with a video experiment with three gay and lesbian couples kissing and holding hands in public. It was shot as candid camera with the idea to see what the reactions of people be like. We also created a website, explaining why it is important to report homophobic hate crimes and what do we want to achieve with this campaign. We got in touch with GLEN, the leading LGBT organization in Ireland, who helped us with their expertise delivering a report form.

4. The local authorities were involved more in the round table discussion with Dutch police officers from Roze in Blauw police network in the Netherlands during September in Sofia. Our effort was to encourage exchange of best practices and to promote inclusive policies, but also to train the Bulgarian police officers how to tackle homophobic hate crime cases, how to set up efficient mechanisms to support victims, etc. • In Bulgaria due to many reasons it is not an easy process to find police officers openly interested in the topic who would come to such event, pay attention and later on become agents of change. We didn’t know how to find those police officers and that’s why we set up a strategy to start from the Ministry of Interior. As you can imagine it could be very difficult to manage to appoint a meeting with the Minister of Interior. So we went the good old way into attending various events where the Minister or other government official could attend as well. Meeting them in person and explaining briefly why we were organizing the event and what support from them we ask for resulted into themselves being personally engaged.

5. What proved to be successful afterwards in the process were the official letters. Two months prior the event GLAS distributed official invitation letters to all human rights commissions, Ministries, MPs, prosecutors, judges, teachers in the Police Academy. It may seem like a forgotten way of communication in the modern digital era, but at least in our experience and in our country this proved to be successful. Local authorities needed to answer back to us whether they will send representatives or not to attend our event and this was a commitment they had to make willing or not. • Couple of weeks later we got official answer back from the Ministry of Interior that 2 police officers are going to attend our event. Two could be a large number, but we needed as many policemen as possible and here another technique proved to be efficient. We ask a person working in the police to give us an advice how we can invite more officers. Knowing the structures well he got with a valuable idea to invite policemen and women from all the regional departments working especially on crimes against the individuals. At the end 20 police officers, judges, human rights activists attended the event which proved to be extremely useful for both sides.

6. The video that we made for the campaign reached more than 6000 people on various social channels. The most important number though is coming from the report form on our website. Since the beginning of the campaign we already had more than 200 reports from various towns around the country. We strongly believe that our project and the engagement of local authorities is leading towards more and more LGBT people who were victims or witnesses of hate crimes to report to the police. Because without reporting nothing will change. But we still have few greater battles to win including the change of the Criminal Code of Bulgaria by including sexual orientation and gender identity in all its articles related to hate crimes.