Zagreb County Court in March ruled that the Vigilare association had discriminated against, incited discrimination against and harassed LGBTIQ persons and their families by launching the petition campaign "Let's protect children from homo adoptions" and posting related statements, the Rainbow Families association said on Wednesday.

“We have been witnessing increasingly frequent attacks on LGBTIQ persons in the public arena, with lies and prejudices being said about our lives and our families. Statements like the ones spread by Vigilare are unfortunately just a drop in the sea of hate speech on social networks, statements full of incorrect information, and lies disseminated for the sake of scoring cheap political points, which results in increasingly frequent physical violence,” warned Rainbow Families president Daniel Martinovic.

He welcomed the courts’ recognising harassment and discrimination but warned that “some groups in society evidently cannot be stopped either by laws or by court rulings.”

The ruling, which has in the meantime become final, is a result of a lawsuit filed by Rainbow Families in late 2022 following a May 2022 ruling by the Supreme Court upholding an earlier court ruling that found that the petition campaign “Stop homo-propaganda by state television. Let’s stop fake rainbows, let’s protect children and the family!”, launched in April 2020, constituted incitement to discrimination and harassment of LGBTIQ persons and their families.

Under the 2022 ruling, Vigilare was to have removed all disturbing content from its web site and was banned from further publishing content discriminating against LGBTIQ persons and their families but it failed to do so, and in late 2022 it launched a new petition campaign on a separate web site, continuing to publish on its web portal and social networks disturbing and discriminating content.

Rainbow Families, which filed the first lawsuit in 2020, therefore launched a new action resulting, in mid-March this year, in a final verdict under which Vigilare continues to incite discrimination.

The new Zagreb County Court ruling orders Vigilare to remove all discriminating content from its web sites and to stop discriminating against LGBTIQ persons and their families as well as to publish the ruling in a daily newspaper.

Given that Vigilare did not comply with the Supreme Court ruling of 2022 and that it still has not removed the new content from its web site, Rainbow Families has filed a report with the municipal prosecutor’s office against Vigilare and its president for failing to comply with the court decision.

Rainbow Families says that under the Penal Code, an official or responsible person who fails to comply with a final court verdict faces a prison sentence of up to two years while a criminal act committed over a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity is recognised as a hate crime and is an aggravating circumstance.