Those problems were on the agenda of a panel discussion “What answer Serbia has to homophobia?” held on Wednesday in Belgrade, on the occasion of the International day against homophobia and transphobia.

The panel said it was necessary to implement the existing laws, to educate the employees in state services and institutions and be more active outside big urban areas.

According to the available data, around a half of million people in Serbia belong to the LGBT population.

They are Serbia’s citizens, taxpayers and thus are eligible to their rights to visit a partner in a hospital, to inherit their partners, to jointly get a bank loan, the panel’s participants said.

Jelena Vasiljevic of the Labris organisation asked the panel if Serbia’s MPs and the state as a whole were aware that the Prime Minister Ana Brnabic, an openly LGBT person, did not have basic human rights.

“She and her partner are not recognised, her partner never follows her on official trips,” Vasiljevic said, adding it was a failure of both the state and the government.

She added that Serbia has a good legal framework for the protection of the LGBT population, but that the problem was in the implementation of the regulations.

Vasiljevic added that it wasn’t true that the discriminatory material about the LGBT people was taken out from the secondary schools’ curriculum.

Helena Vukovic of the Egal association said that PM Brnabic could not solve all the problems of the gay populations.

“We in Serbia are used to have a single person who solves our problems, so we now expect Brnabic to do the same. She won’t because she can’t.”

“Instead,” Vukovic said, “the courts must be more effective,” adding that not a single hate crime against the LGBT population saw its legal end.

"When an incident happens, police do their job, but then everything stops at a prosecutor’s office where deals are made, and charges reduced to exclude the hate crime,” Vukovic said.

She added that 90 percent of the gay population wanted to have children and that no one could talk about a fall in birth rate because of the LGBT population.

Brankica Jankovic, the Commissioner for Protection of Equality, said that the main reason behind the prejudices against the LGBT population lied in the “lack of knowledge and understanding.”

Jankovic said that out of the last year’s total number of complainants she got, 42, or 6.6 percent were related to the discrimination on the sexual orientation basis.

The director of the Office for Human and Minority Rights Suzana Paunovic said that police data showed that between 2011 and 2017 there were 39 cases of reported attacks on the LGBT people, five of which ended in heavy bodily harm, while 14 people suffered light injuries.

She added that at the same period 25 cases of verbal attacks were reported, criminal charges were brought against 28 people and 12 were held In custody.  

The panel was told that a MINI Pride will be held on June 23, while Belgrade Pride was scheduled for September 16.