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GAY

Gay minister pulls Sochi trip in Crimea protest

Norway will send no official representation to the Sochi Paralympic Winter Games, authorities said on Tuesday, in response to Russia's military intervention in Ukraine.

Gay minister pulls Sochi trip in Crimea protest
Bent Høie and Dag Terje Solvang at Oslo Pride in June last year. Photo: Erlend Aas / Scanpix NTB
Princess Märtha-Louise and Health Minister Bent Hoie have cancelled plans to attend the ten-day event set to open on Friday, the Norwegian Royal Court and government said.
 
Hoie made headlines last month when he announced he planned to attend with his husband Dag Terje Solvang, a senior advertising executive, something that was taken as a small act of defiance against the much protested gay propaganda law Russia brought in last year. 
  
The Norwegian team will attend the Games as planned, a delegation official told reporters.
   
Norway's Foreign Minister Boerge Brende who will travel to Kiev on Thursday to meet with Ukrainian authorities, told a press conference that the current crisis "was the most serious crisis between the West and Russia since the end of the Cold War".
   
NATO member Norway shares a border with Russia.

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GAY

Germany to compensate gay soldiers who faced discrimination

Chancellor Angela Merkel's government on Wednesday agreed a draft bill that would compensate gay soldiers who faced discrimination in the armed forces between 1955 and 2000.

Germany to compensate gay soldiers who faced discrimination
A German flag is sewed to the uniform of a Bundeswehr soldier in Dresden. Photo: DPA

Under the proposed law, which needs to be approved by parliament, soldiers
who were convicted by military courts for being gay, demoted or who otherwise
saw their careers damaged because of their sexual orientation, would receive a
“symbolic amount” of €3,000.

“We cannot erase the suffering inflicted upon these people,” Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told the RND newspaper group. “But we want
to send a signal” and “turn the page on a dark chapter in the history of the
armed forces”, she said.

The compensation would apply to soldiers from the Bundeswehr, which was
created in West Germany in 1955, and to troops from former East Germany's
National People's Army, founded in 1956.

READ ALSO: More Germans identify as LGBT than in rest of Europe

The defence ministry estimates that about 1,000 people would be eligible
for a payout.

Military court judgments against soldiers for engaging in consensual gay sex acts would also be quashed under the draft bill.

It took until 1969 for homosexuality to be decriminalised in West Germany, but discrimination against gay service people continued for much longer, including after Germany was reunified in 1990.

Gay soldiers could expect to be overlooked for promotions or removed from positions of responsibility, with senior officers often deeming them a “security risk” or a bad example to others.

That ended with a law change in 2000 that officially protected gay, lesbian
and bisexual people from discrimination in the armed forces.

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