The Basic Court in Bitola, adjudicating on the lawsuit filed by the plaintiff, the Association for Sexual and Gender Minorities “Queer Center” Skopje, against the defendant D.S. from Bitola, to determine repeated and prolonged discrimination, on June 16, 2023, rendered a verdict establishing that the defendant D.S. violated the right to equal treatment of the LGBTI+ community by committing a severe form of discrimination, expressing repeated, prolonged, and recurrent discrimination and harassment by posting texts on the Facebook social network.
In the lawsuit, we stated that the defendant, within a one-year period – from June 2021 to June 2022 – carried out multiple temporally related actions constituting repeated commission of the same offense, utilizing similar opportunities and circumstances, by sharing racist and xenophobic written material through a computer system on a private profile on the Facebook social network, promoting hatred against the LGBTI+ community. The text provoked comments, likes, and shares among other users of the social network, further inciting hatred against the LGBTI+ community.
Before filing the lawsuit, the Queer Center submitted complaints to the Commission for Protection from Discrimination, after which the Commission determined prolonged and repeated harassment based on gender identity, sexual orientation, and belonging to a marginalized group committed by the defendant through writing texts with disturbing content directed at LGBTI+ individuals, and instructed the defendant to remove the contentious texts, publicly apologize for the written texts, and refrain from making comments that incite hate speech against the LGBTI+ community in the future. The defendant did not comply with the recommendations of the commission within the legally prescribed period of 30 days from the date of receiving the opinion of the commission, after which the Queer Center filed a lawsuit against her.
Meanwhile, before the verdict was issued, the defendant publicly apologized in a television interview on TV ALFA and deleted the relevant posts from the Facebook social network. The court, based on the presented evidence and the opinions of the Commission for Protection from Discrimination regarding the submitted complaints, once again found the discrimination committed by the defendant.
This verdict is the first convicting verdict in Macedonia for discrimination against the LGBTI+ community following the adoption of the Law on Prevention and Protection against Discrimination, which explicitly prohibits discrimination on any discriminatory basis, including based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and belonging to a marginalized group.
The Queer Center considers this verdict to be a significant success in combating discrimination, especially when it comes to discrimination against this particularly vulnerable and marginalized group. Moreover, this case is one of several legal cases we are pursuing, and we hope it will serve as a positive example and contribute to the expedited resolution of other cases.