A kiss, eight hundred comments and a ruling from Strasbourg
A kiss on Facebook, hundreds of hate comments, no investigation. Until Strasbourg presented Lithuania with the bill.
On 14 January 2020, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against Lithuania because the country had let two young men down. Their offence? A kiss.
Pijus Beizaras and Mangirdas Levickas were a couple. In December 2014, they posted a photo on Facebook showing them kissing. A picture like countless couples in love share. It was meant to show that there are gay couples in Lithuania too. The reaction was devastating. Around eight hundred comments piled up under the picture, many of them full of hate. The two should be burned, castrated or beaten to death, strangers wrote.
The couple turned to the Lithuanian Gay League, which filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General's Office. But the authorities saw no reason to investigate. The comments were unethical, but not criminal. The courts upheld this view and even went further: the two men's behaviour had been "eccentric", and they should have expected rejection. Criminal proceedings would merely be a waste of time and resources.
The seven judges in Strasbourg unanimously took a different view. Lithuania had discriminated against the men because of their sexual orientation and denied them an effective remedy. Those who incite hatred against a group do not first have to call for concrete acts of violence before the state is obliged to intervene. And it is precisely minorities that the state must protect, even if part of the population rejects them. Each of the two men received five thousand euros in compensation.
The ruling is regarded as a milestone in the fight against online hate. It makes clear that authorities may not dismiss homophobic threats as harmless expressions of opinion. It is still cited today whenever states in Europe look the other way in the face of hate speech against queer people.