(Adnkronos) – The Slovak Parliament today adopted an amendment to the Constitution that limits the rights of Lgbtq people and establishes the primacy of national law over European law. The text, which limits the rights of same-sex couples and makes it more difficult for intersex people to change their sex, was approved by 90 deputies out of the 99 present, in a Parliament that has a total of 150 elected members. The opposition did not take part in the vote, apart from the newly elected members, who added their votes to the majority.
The vote, initially scheduled for the day before yesterday, had been announced as postponed indefinitely due to the lack of an acquired majority, before returning to the Chamber’s agenda today. “It is a shameful vote,” said the leader of the main opposition party, Progresivne Slovensko, Michal Simecka, lamenting the “betrayal” of opposition members who allowed the text to be approved, for which the government did not have the majority required by the Constitution.
For Simecka, this amendment “will harm the Slovak people and call into question Slovakia’s place in the EU and its legal space.” At the end of last January, after the publication of the draft amendment, nationalist Prime Minister Robert Fico had invoked “the traditions, the cultural and spiritual heritage of our ancestors,” to erect “a constitutional barrier to progressivism” and restore “common sense.”
“We have two sexes, male and female,” defined at birth, the government proposal stated, echoing the terms used by United States President Donald Trump on his inauguration day. “Sex can only be changed for serious reasons, according to terms that will be established by law,” the amendment stated, reserving the adoption of minors to married couples only, with rare exceptions. The draft amendment also established that Slovakia’s “sovereignty” on such “cultural and ethical issues” should take precedence over European law.
In an opinion issued last Wednesday, the Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe (a non-EU international organization based in Strasbourg) composed of constitutional law experts, warned Slovakia against approving a similar amendment. It stated that states should not create a conflict between “cultural issues” and the international treaties they have signed.
Slovakia has been a member of the European Union since 2004 and committed to respecting fundamental rights upon accession. During a previous term, in 2014, Robert Fico had the Constitution enshrine marriage as “a union exclusively between a man and a woman.”
A year later, Fico organized a referendum aimed at blocking the path to same-sex marriage, which was invalidated due to low turnout. The country’s schools are called upon to “teach only” what is compliant with the Constitution.
During the public debate preceding the vote, the director of the NGO Iniciativa Inakost (Otherness), Martin Macko, denounced a text that “introduces new obstacles in the transition treatment of transgender people.” This text “consolidates in the fundamental law the inequalities that affect families composed of same-sex people,” according to the activist, “a first concrete step that moves us away from the EU.”
According to him, the initiative aims above all to “distract attention” from the current political crisis in Slovakia, with Fico’s coalition under pressure due to massive demonstrations to defend the rule of law and to reject rapprochement with Russia. The sovereignist government, in power since October 2023, has already recently announced the end of subsidies to Lgbt rights associations. A minister has also denounced an ideology that leads “to the extinction of the white race.” In 2022, the murder of two men in a gay bar in Bratislava by the son of a member of a small far-right party shook the Slovak Lgbt community.
