MOSCOW, July 10. /TASS/. The issue of respecting the rights of the LGBT community in Russia is whipped up by the EU to sling mud at Moscow, senior Russian lawmaker Leonid Slutsky told reporters on Monday.
"The LGBT issue is not only a significant part of European life in politics, which is unclear for us, but a pretext for provocations," Slutsky, who chairs the State Duma Committee for International Affairs, said after a summer session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation on Europe (OSCE).
The lawmaker commented on a question about the reasons behind such a highly-focused campaign on this issue by representatives of some countries who attended the session in the Belarusian capital Minsk.
"They mention the territories, where such things are unacceptable due to some religious and spiritual traditions [for example, in Chechnya] and the issue of representatives of the LGBT community in Chechnya is tossed in somewhere at international platforms thousands of kilometers away from Chechnya," the MP pointed out. "Certainly, a perplexed reaction by the Chechen leadership follows suit."
"This is a chain of provocations where Russian representatives’ reaction can be sized up in advance since it is well-known. They toss in such topics to later demonize Russia for this issue," Slutsky said, noting that this also refers to other countries.
Mass media reports earlier claimed that gay men have been subjected to persecution in Chechnya. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov earlier said that regional authorities were ready to cooperate with federal agencies in order to look into media reports about the situation with sexual minorities in the region. However, no official reports on their persecution have been received yet.