Forbidden Colours Slams Flawed EU Consultation on LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy
Forbidden Colours is sounding the alarm over the European Commission’s launched consultation on the future of the LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy. While the Commission presents this process as an inclusive and forward-looking exercise, the reality is far bleaker: the consultation is structurally flawed, politically detached, and risks repeating the same critical errors that led the 2020–2025 strategy to fail.
“This is not a moment for bureaucratic continuity — it’s a moment for radical political courage,” said Rémy Bonny, Executive Director of Forbidden Colours. “The Commission cannot act like this is business as usual while Member States are openly dismantling the rule of law and targeting LGBTIQ+ people in broad daylight.”
A Strategy Built on the Wrong Assumptions — To Be Repeated
In 2020, the first LGBTIQ Equality Strategy was developed in a political landscape already marked by serious warning signs: Poland had declared “LGBT-free zones,” Hungary was restricting legal gender recognition, and attacks on civil society were accelerating. Yet the Commission responded with soft tools, non-binding coordination, and legislative proposals that required unanimous approval in the Council — an impossibility given the growing influence of anti-rights governments.
Five years later, those failures have become more obvious and more dangerous. Pride marches are banned. Civil society organisations are surveilled or defunded. So-called “anti-LGBT propaganda” laws are spreading. But instead of adapting to this reality, the Commission has launched a consultation built on the same broken model.
The structure of the consultation mirrors the old strategy —recycling its categories, assumptions, and vague framing. And its questions are not only misleading but deeply troubling:
- It asks respondents to rank which rights LGBTIQ+ people should prioritise, as if bodily autonomy, legal recognition, or family life were negotiable.
- It frames the entire process as a question of what “the EU” should do — blurring responsibility and failing to clarify that this is a Commission document, not a Council or Parliament initiative.
- It presents soft, symbolic actions as equivalent to real legal enforcement, while barely mentioning the Commission’s actual tools: infringement procedures, interim measures, and conditionality in funding.
“This consultation invites us to choose which rights matter most. That’s not just inadequate — it’s offensive,” said Vincent Reillon, Senior Advocacy Officer at Forbidden Colours. “It’s institutional gaslighting. Fundamental rights are not a menu — and the Commission’s job is not to ask what to protect, but to protect it all.”
The consultation itself has become a vivid illustration of the crisis.
The anti-rights movements have seized the public-feedback portal of the Commission to broadcast hostile messages. To this date, 60% of the 350+ submissions published oppose the objectives or the adoption or the EU LGBTIQ Equality Strategy. 5 % of the contributions were removed outright for hate speech.
These hateful contributions recycle the so called ‘anti-gender’ movement’s familiar talking-points with accusations of the EU spreading “gender ideology”, calls to strip trans and intersex people from equal-rights agendas and claims that the fundamental rights of women and trans people cannot coexist.
Answers demonstrate a level of coordination that exemplifies just how critical the moment is. The Commission must treat the next strategy not as routine policy-making, but as an urgent defence of fundamental rights.
What the Commission Must Do — Now
The Commission has limited legislative competence on equality matters. But it is not powerless. It has enforcement tools, legal responsibilities, and a clear mandate to uphold the EU Treaties and Charter of Fundamental Rights. It simply needs to start using them systematically.
Forbidden Colours calls for a complete reorientation of the LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy — one grounded in legal action, political honesty, and institutional accountability.
Specifically, with the new strategy, the Commission must commit to:
- Launch infringement procedures systematically and without delays against Member States that violate the Charter, EU law, or CJEU jurisprudence (e.g. pride bans, censorship, NGO crackdowns).
- Request interim measures to suspend discriminatory laws that cause immediate harm.
- Trigger and extend the conditionality funding mechanisms to cut EU funds to governments attacking minorities and the democratic order.
- Massively increase funding for civil society — not just project-based, but structural support for organisations defending democracy, equality, and the rule of law.
- Name the threats clearly and publicly. No more euphemisms. If the EU can denounce external disinformation and authoritarianism, it must do the same when those threats come from within.
“You don’t fight a wildfire with a watering can. You don’t respond to authoritarian backsliding with roundtables and guidance documents,” said Bonny. “The Commission is not a think tank. It is the guardian of the Treaties. And it is time it acted like it.”
This Is No Longer About Social Progress. It’s About Political Survival.
What LGBTIQ+ people face in the EU today is not slow progress — it is deliberate regression. It is a coordinated political project to scapegoat minorities, weaken rights, and test the limits of EU inaction. If the Commission fails again, it will not just be a policy failure. It will be a betrayal — of LGBTIQ+ people, of democracy, and of the very idea of a “Union of values.”
Forbidden Colours urges citizens, civil society organisations, and allies to respond to the consultation forcefully — and to demand that the next strategy finally matches the scale of the threat.
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