Gay rights protesters detained
Demonstration held in Russia against abuses in Chechnya
MOSCOW — The Russian police detained about 20 gay rights protesters Monday, among them the leader of a group that is helping gay men escape from the southern province of Chechnya, where they face abuse, including torture.
The protesters held a demonstration on the sidelines of a May Day parade in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city.
The treatment of gays in Chechnya has prompted protests outside Russia, but the demonstration Monday was the first significant action inside the country, and it ended, perhaps predictably, with arrests. Russia has strict rules on political activity in public.
Some protesters lay on the pavement draped in a rainbow flag and the flag of Chechnya. Others carried placards objecting to the mistreatment of gay men in Chechnya, news footage showed.
“They even deny they exist and deny the problem exists,” Andrei Potapov, one of the protesters, told Euronews of Chechen officials. A spokesman for the regional leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, told the New York Times this month that Chechnya had no gay men.
It was not clear why the police had detained the activists.
Among them was Igor Kochetkov, director of the Russian LGBT Network, a group that has been providing gay men from Chechnya with safe houses elsewhere in Russia.
Tens of thousands of people in Russia attend May Day parades, which are intended to highlight labor issues and defend the rights of workers.
Fontanka, a St. Petersburg news portal, reported that the police had detained 18 people under a law against “violations by participants of a public activity of the rules of its implementation.”
That implied that the gay rights message had not been approved for the prolabor marches, though the Fontanka report did not say precisely how the protesters had violated the parade rules.
Videos posted online showed activists carrying rainbow flags, and then police officers bundling some of them into a van. Reached by cellphone in jail, Kochetkov said about 20 people had been arrested, Reuters reported.