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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.

Scammers, robbers, and attackers are exploiting the “LGBT extremism” and “gay propaganda” laws to threaten LGBTQIA+ people and justify crimes against them. We found several recent cases illustrating how perpetrators weaponise these discriminatory laws. It might be a sign of escalating persecution of LGBTQIA+ people in Russia. As evidence from other countries shows, discriminatory laws become a tool of violence for both the state and non-state groups, such as vigilantes.

Discriminatory anti-LGBTQIA+ laws have been in force in Russia for more than a decade. We publish research and data revealing the harmful consequences of these laws. The goal is to gather evidence necessary for future legal reform and condemnation of the Russian discriminatory state policies.

Officially, statistics on hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ people in Russia have never been collected. By analysing openly published rulings of Russian courts for the past 14 years, we have identified over 1,200 such crimes. Because these are only the cases that reached the court, the real number of crimes can be much higher. The number of crimes, including premeditated group attacks, has significantly increased since the adoption of the discriminatory “gay propaganda” law in 2013.