First sentences under Russia’s new LGBT laws

First sentences under Russias new LGBT laws
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full screen A person protests for the rights of LGBTQI people in St. Petersburg in 2015. File photo. Photo: Dmitry Lovetsky/AP/TT

Anastasia Yershova from Nizhny Novgorod became, as far as is known, the first person outside of Russia to be sentenced under the new harsh LGBT laws that were introduced last November.

Yershova was sentenced last week to five days in jail for wearing rainbow-colored earrings in public, independent Russian news site Mediazona reports.

The sentence against her was followed by a man, Artyom P in Volgograd, being fined 1,000 rubles, the equivalent of 120 kroner, for posting a picture of a rainbow flag on social media.

A third verdict was handed down on Monday, when photographer Inna Mosina from the city of Saratov was fined 1,500 rubles for posting a number of pictures of rainbow flags on Instagram.

It was last November last year that the Supreme Court declared that the LGBTQ movement is extreme. After the government argued in a case that it had seen “manifestations of an extremist nature” and attempts at incitement by the LGBTQ movement to achieve “social and religious disharmony” in the country, HD banned “all such activity”.

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