Aims:

The project promoted the idea of a national LGBTI equality plan to the Bulgarian authorities. Bilitis refered to resolutions of the European Parliament, and EU countries’ best practices in adoption of roadmaps for LGBTI equality as the basis for developing of policy statements, which were presented to progressively-minded politicians who share the EU values. One of the project objectives was to organize an LGBTI task force and attract political allies. The activities included identifying policy gaps and development of recommendations for new policies, meetings, press conference and a closing conference.

Activities:

Policy statement was developed and disseminated to all parliamentary represented political parties, which promoted the EU values, and to other political parties, which were currently not in parliament, but their leaders nevertheless played a role as opinion-makers. After the general elections of October 5, 2014 the policy paper was disseminated to the relevant Ministries: Ministry of Education, Ministry of justice, Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, to the Ombudsperson and to the Commission for Protection against Discrimination. The latter were invited to send representatives to the open discussion of the proposed strategy.

There was very weak response from all public institutions. Most of them, except for the Commission for Protection against Discrimination rejected the invitations with the explanation that they are very busy. The final conference in Dec. 2014 attracted 35 participants, most of whom were human rights advocates and NGO leaders. The only public institution attending the event was the Commission for Protection against Discrimination, and the only political party, which sent representatives was DEOS.