[Presenter] Today [23 April] there has been a lot of discussion on the sensational proposition of the People's Deputy bloc, announced yesterday, according to which homosexuality would be recriminalized...
We carried out a poll today on this issue, and it turned out that the votes of listeners were pretty much divided down the middle. Fifty-three per cent of those polled said they did not support the People's Deputy proposition for homosexuality to be recriminalized, while forty-seven per cent said that were in favour of it. The poll was conducted during the course of five minutes and included 2,813 telephone calls.
Now we can talk live by telephone to the Russian human rights commissioner, Oleg Mironov. Oleg Orestovich, good evening.
How do you react to the proposal to reinstate in the Criminal Code a paragraph on criminalizing homosexuality?
[Mironov] The Criminal Code does in fact contain criminal provisions for homosexual acts, where they constitute rape or they occur with regard to minors. However, I do not think that we should return to the old Criminal Code in which voluntary relations of this type were punishable in law.
There are, indeed, people of a different sexual orientation and I should say
they have a right to this.
I know that in Sweden there is a special ombudsman whose duty it is to protect the rights of sexual minorities. When I was in the Russian embassy in Denmark recently they told me that the Danes register marriages between people of the same sex. A number of such marriages have been registered, where one of the partners has been a young person from Russia.
I don't think that this is something which should be promoted, or advertised. It is too intimate and personal an affair. But, I would say, that you can't use the Criminal Code to solve all issues related to human rights.
I think that if people have normal sexual tastes there is no need to drive them into the arms of homosexuality. But if there are people who have this sexual orientation, then we see that all over the world their rights are protected...
I think that at the moment in this respect the Criminal Code should be left as it is. The thing I would change is the age of consent, which I would raise to 16. At the moment it is legal to have such relations if a person is 14 years old. This, I think, is a problem.
[Presenter] As far as I can understand, if the proposal made by parliamentary deputy [Gennadiy] Raykov and his bloc [People's Deputy] is adopted, then this will amount to a violation of human rights.
[Mironov] At the very least, this will be a violation of the rights of those
sexual minorities, of those people who have a different sexual orientation from the overwhelming majority of people. This is recognized all over the world.