Polish president vows to ban LGBT teaching in schools

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2. More from Poland

Poland Punishes LGBT Rights Activist with Pretrial Detention

Warsaw police have arrested a nonbinary activist, Margot Szutowicz, who has been placed in pretrial detention, in the latest example of Polish authorities’ anti-LGBT actions. Forty-eight other people, from a crowd of LGBT rights supporters protesting Szutowicz’s imminent arrest last Friday, were also briefly detained but have been released. An investigation by the Polish Commissioner for Human Rights found that some of those arrested were not protestors but merely bystanders, and further that police insulted and humiliated LGBT detainees.

Polish authorities should seek to have Szutowicz’s pretrial detention lifted. Szutowicz is being held for two months awaiting trial for allegedly causing damage to a truck promoting false anti-LGBT propaganda and assaulting a pro-life demonstrator on June 27. The charges carry multi-year prison sentences.

Szutowicz was first arrested in connection with this case on July 14. The prosecutor requested pretrial detention but the district court in Warsaw-Mokotów denied that request and released her. However, prosecutors appealed, and on August 7, another court issued an order for two months pretrial detention. Szutowicz is currently being held in a single-person cell due to Covid-19 quarantine restrictions but, in violation of her due process rights, has not been allowed to contact her lawyer.

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