Global Voices Online

Latvia: Baltic Pride March

Sunday, May 17th, 2009 @ 00:35 UTC

by Veronica Khokhlova

Countries:: Latvia
Topics:: Freedom of Speech, Cyber-Activism, Human Rights, Law, LGBT, Protest, Politics
Languages:: English

This post is also available in:

Español:

Letonia: Marcha del Orgullo Báltico...

“The Baltic Pride march took place in Riga on May 16 with almost no problems,” Free Speech Emergency in Latvia reports. “The active counter demonstrators were just a little more in number than the marchers. […] An interesting observation […] was a scene at one street crossing passed by the march where there were perhaps 150 people simply watching, expressing no negative emotions. Maybe there is a seed of tolerance, though judging by the hysterical and hateful comments in the portals (delfi.lv), this is still a country with a huge element of post-soviet, mindless neanderthals.”

Start the Conversation

Recent Links also in Eastern & Central Europe

On November 29, thousands of people in Moscow went out on the streets to protest against the construction of a new trading center. This center would replace the “Cherkizovski” market [ENG], which was closed down in June because of many illegal activities on its premises. The photos of the protest can be found here [RUS].

The Russian Coordination Center for the new national Cyrillic domain .RF stopped the application process for new domains. Anti-cybersquatting measures turned out to be infective and the center plans to review the rules of submission process, Russian news agency Prime-Tass reported [RUS]. It's not clear what will happen to the registered domains. Some sources claim that all previously approved domains will be deleted.

A new law “On Ensuring Access to Information about Activities of Government Bodies and Municipal Authorities” [RUS] will require, among other things, creating public Internet terminals all around Russia. But netizens question [RUS] the feasibility of the law.