From tolerance during Ottoman times to criminalisation, throughout the 20th century, homosexuality has remained a highly sensitive issue in this Balkan society, a leading activist explains.
As June is globally marked as Pride month, the lawyer, author and human rights activist Ivan Jankovic tells BIRN in an interview that – just as the roots of homophobia in Serbia can be traced back to the country’s historic opposition to the Ottomans – traces of this toxic legacy remain evident today.
“The Serbian authorities obsessively gathered accusations against Turks about sexual attacks on boys, while, in contrast to the ‘sodomite corruption’ of the Ottoman conquerors, a picture of Serbian society as strictly heterosexual and patriarchal was cherished,” Jankovic notes.
There is a striking similarity here with the contemporary obsession of conservative circles in Serbia today, who almost unanimously perceive homosexuality as something imported from the ‘decadent’ West.
Britain, he recalls, decriminalised homosexuality in the mid-20th century following a debate between Herbert Lionel Hart, Philosopher of Law, and Judge Patrick Arthur Devlin, and following the 1957 parliamentary report presented by John Wolfenden, proposing an end to the legal prosecution of homosexual relations.
The Hart-Devlin debate had a global impact, helping to lead to the gradual decriminalisation of homosexuality in many countries during the second half of the 20thcentury. Socialist Yugoslavia was one of them.
The Yugoslav criminal code, under Article 186, prescribed a prison sentence of up to two years for the offence of homosexual relation.
This was about to change, however, with the transfer of jurisdiction from federal level to the Republics and Autonomous Provinces, after the constitutional changes in 1974.
When the Yugoslav republics adopted their own criminal codes in 1977, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Vojvodina abolished the crime of consensual homosexual relations between adult. More conservative Serbia only followed suit in 1994.
Jankovic recalls the arguments of the time only too well.
“As a postgraduate student of Law in Belgrade back in 1969, I tried to apply Hart’s and Devlin’s arguments to Yugoslav criminal code,” he says. “While analysing judicial statistics, I found out that in Serbia at that time, every year at least one legal process for the offence of homosexual relation resulted in a jail sentence.”
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
