On 17 November, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) published a hate crime report for 2024. The data are provided by the participating states and civil society organisations, including Dataout. We identified anti-LGBTQIA+ hate crimes in Russia by analysing court rulings.
Although the OSCE has 57 participating states, only 26 reported official cases of ‘anti-LGBTI’ or ‘gender-based’ hate crimes this year. The majority of the states that oppress LGBTQAI+ rights and marginalise queer people—such as Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan—reported none. Thanks to documentation by independent human rights organisations, ODIHR can still provide data on SOGIESC-based hate crimes in these countries. The report is available on the ODIHR website.
Police often attack queer people in authoritarian states
Law-enforcement abuse targeting queer individuals, particularly trans people and gay men, is widespread in Central Asian and Eastern European countries, according to ODIHR data.
In Kazakhstan, where 61 SOGIESC-based hate incidents were recorded, “trans women and sex workers were particularly affected”, ODIHR concludes, “involving violence by family members, clients, and law enforcement officers.” This year, in November, the situation with LGBTQIA+ rights in the country worsened as the lower house of the Kazakhstan parliament approved a Russian-style ban on so-called “LGBT propaganda”.
Eight out of twelve incidents recorded in Belarus affected trans people, “who were subjected to physical assaults, threats, abductions, humiliation, and coerced confessions related to their gender identity by law enforcement officers.”
In Uzbekistan, where consensual sex between men is still a criminal offense, ODIHR recorded 59 incidents. Most of them were “perpetrated by law enforcement”, and the victims are primarily gay men. Police in Uzbekistan used dating apps to entrap victims, “after which they were physically assaulted and forced to pay bribes under threat of prosecution based on their sexual orientation”.
Similar patterns of blackmail, extortion, and physical assault by police were documented in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
In Russia, police raids on queer clubs and spaces became systematic by 2024, after the adoption of the “LGBT extremism” law.
SOGIESC-based hate crimes in Russia
This year, ODIHR received 181 ‘Anti-LGBTI’ and ‘Gender-based’ hate crime incidents in Russia from seven organisations, including Dataout. Seventy percent (130) of these incidents involved physical violence.
In its insights, ODIHR mentioned that in 2024, there were “numerous incidents involving police participation in abductions, raids, beatings, extortion, and ‘fake-date’ blackmail”. Our research documented cases when police or perpetrators posing as police blackmailed and threatened victims based on their sexual orientation.
A new type of systematic persecution of queer people in Russia emerged at the end of 2023, when police raided clubs and private parties, “where attendees were forced to the floor, physically assaulted, filmed and had their sexual orientation disclosed, including to the public”, ODIHR reports.
One of the police raids in November 2024 involved around 40 people:
Around forty visitors to a gay club were detained during a raid by security forces, with one attendee tasered for giving the wrong name and others taken to the police station without legal grounds. This was one in a series of incidents targeting LGBTI clubs and parties.
– reported by “Coming Out” LGBT Group
Besides the raids, ODIHR also highlights that transgender and non-binary people in Russia were “disproportionately affected” by “family violence, forced marriage, or public humiliation.”
How we document hate crimes
Through our project Grey Rainbow, we collect hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ individuals using publicly accessible repositories of Russian court rulings. We used a set of keywords and filters to identify relevant cases and applied ODIHR’s guidelines to find indicators of hate crimes in court rulings. Although these cases resulted in criminal convictions, courts systematically ignore SOGIESC-based hate motives, making hate crimes invisible. Earlier this year, we published research and data on hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ people in Russia from 2010 through 2023.
In 2024, we collected 36 hate crime cases from the Russian court ruling. Most of these cases involve physical violence. In 7 cases, victims were killed.
The ODIHR report included 16 of the 36 cases we found, because they count incidents that occurred within the reporting year. As court cases can take more than a year to progress through the judicial system, some of the crimes we found in 2024 had actually taken place between 2022 and 2023. We expect more hate crimes from 2024 to surface in future court rulings. We publish all collected cases on the dataset page.
Despite the fact that several organisations report on SOGIESC-based hate crimes in Russia, the ODIHR data represent only their minimal level. The Russian state does not record hate crimes. Only a small number of victims tell about threats and violence to the human rights organisation, a few cases become known to mass media, and even a smaller share of cases end up in courts.
Grey Rainbow will continue documenting hate crimes and monitoring the consequences of Russia’s discriminatory “LGBT propaganda” and “LGBT extremism” laws.