Rainbow Night

formed a rainbow to protest the 2020 inauguration of President Andrzej Duda. According to a 2019 survey, 24% of Poles believe that the LGBTQ movement is the greatest threat facing their country. Between 2019 and 2020, nearly 100 Polish municipalities and regions declared themselves "LGBT-free zones". The ruling Law and Justice party ran an anti-LGBTQ campaign during the 2020 Polish presidential election. President Andrzej Duda emphasized the issue, stating, "LGBT is not people, it's an ideology", calling it an "ideology of evil" that is "even more dangerous to mankind than communism". Duda narrowly won the election, by the thinnest margin since the end of the Soviet Union. According to ILGA-Europe's 2020 report, Poland is ranked worst among European Union countries for LGBTQ rights.), have adopted illegal direct action tactics due to frustration with what they see as increasing, state-sponsored attacks against them. One target is the vans belonging to , which are covered in anti-LGBT slogans associating homosexuality and pedophilia, a message which the vans also broadcast on loudspeakers. The drivers know where the Stop Bzdurom activists live and target their place of residence. Stop Bzdurom activists took a different approach, spray-painting the vans and breaking off their license plates. Małgorzata Szutowicz, better known as Margot, is another member of Stop Bzdurom and Madej's partner. Not all LGBTQ people in Poland agree with Stop Bzdurom's tactics. The activists released a manifesto, stating, "As long as the rainbow scandalizes anybody and is treated as inappropriate we solemnly pledge to provoke". The action shocked some Polish Catholics, On 5 August, Margot, Madej, and another activist involved in the flag drapings were arrested for "insulting religious feelings and disrespecting Warsaw monuments", charged, and released after about 40 hours. Warsaw's mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski, stated that he disapproved of the flag draping but criticized the arrests for violating the rule of law. ==7 August mass arrest==

, police station where arrested activists were held|alt=|227x227px On 7 August 2020, a second judge granted an arrest warrant against Małgorzata "Margot" Szutowicz which provided for two months pre-trial detention, Some protestors used civil disobedience to prevent this. Two people sat on the hood of the police car while others blocked the path of the vehicle. Among those arrested were LGBTQ activist Bartosz Staszewski, a 52-year-old amateur journalist, Malgorzata Rawinska, who had been reporting on the protest, Campaign Against Homophobia reported that "The police were aggressively pushing the protesters out of the way, knocking people to the ground and holding them down with their boots". Some of those arrested reported being beaten by police and suffering injuries, questioned without a lawyer present, or denied medical treatment and water. Some were strip-searched despite no indication that they possessed drugs or any dangerous item, and transgender arrestees were misgendered. ==Solidarity demonstrations==

, decorated with a rainbow on 14 August 2020 After word got out of the arrests, sympathizers gathered outside the police stations to protest, and multiple parliamentarians, including Magdalena Filiks and Klaudia Jachira of Civic Coalition, visited the police stations to ensure that detainees' human rights were respected. Pro-bono legal help was offered to many of those arrested. and "She will never walk alone!" Activists pinned a rainbow flag to the Copernicus monument Over the weekend, solidarity demonstrations were also held in Kraków (300 people attended), Lublin, Wrocław, Rzeszów, Białowieża, Bydgoszcz, Gdańsk, Łódź, Poznań, Tarnów, and Zielona Góra. The demonstration in Częstochowa on 10 August attracted around 150 participants, including Democratic Left Alliance MP Zdzisław Wolski. On 17 August, there was a solidarity demonstration in , Sosnowiec, attended by about 20 people including Modern MP Monika Rosa and local politician Janusz Kubicki. Police had to protect them from a larger group of counter-demonstrators who threatened and insulted the participants in the soldiarity demonstration; one of them was later criminally charged for making threats. , 20 August|244x244px During the next week, solidarity demonstrations were held outside the Polish Institute in Berlin and in front of the Polish embassy in Budapest. and Rainbow Slovakia activists hung a rainbow flag on the statue of Pope John Paul II in Bratislava. Soldiarity protests occurred on 10 August and 13 August outside the Polish consulate in Edinburgh. On 15 August, a protest reportedly attended by 100 people was held outside the Polish embassy in London, as well as demonstrations in Manchester and Newcastle the same day, The protests in the United Kingdom were organized by members of the Polish diaspora. The week after the mass arrest, in Szczecin an activist was cited for carrying a sign stating "Jesus would walk with us", which was alleged to fall under the crime of "offending religious feelings". Six people in Kraków were cited for hanging a rainbow flag over a statue of the Wawel Dragon; possible charges suggested by the police included "putting an object in the wrong place" and "disturbing public order". Undeterred, activists continue to block vans and drape rainbow flags despite others facing criminal charges for these actions. Rainbow flags have been hung on buildings, including the former SS headquarters in Warsaw, of the University of Warsaw, and Polish Theatre in Poznań. =="Stop LGBT aggression" counter-demonstrations==

, 2019 On Sunday 16 August, nationalist demonstrators held a demonstration in Krakowskie Przedmieście, near the main gate of the University of Warsaw, called "Stop LGBT aggression" ("Przeciw agresji LGBT" or "Stop agresji LGBT"). Demonstrators burned a rainbow flag—which counter-demonstrators stated was stolen from them—and shouted, "Away with deviation" and "How's Margot?" On the nationalist side, All-Polish Youth leader Ziemowit Przebitkowski, MP Krzysztof Bosak (Confederation) and anti-abortion activist Kaja Godek gave speeches. A counter-demonstration was attended by The Greens MPs and Małgorzata Tracz, as well as Civic Coalition's MP Franciszek Sterczewski and The Left MP Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk. A heavy police presence kept both groups strictly separated from each other. Prior to the demonstration, someone had painted a rainbow on the street, which police said was an unknown substance that posed a threat to vehicle traffic. ==Reactions==

The Polish Ombudsman, Adam Bodnar, stated that he was deeply concerned by the police response. His office had interviewed 33 of those arrested on 7 August 2020, and launched an investigation. Bodnar added that he thought it was unnecessary to arrest so many people and that the excessive police actions "constituted abuse of human rights". On TOK FM radio station, lawyer Michal Wawrykiewicz stated: "The way the police behaved is incompatible with Polish law. The names and ranks of the officers were missing on the uniforms. And finally, access to legal counsel was made difficult for the arrested." Trzaskowski stated that the response to the protest was "grossly disproportionate". However, Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro, of United Poland party, defended the police response and said "defense of banditry by politicians is unheard of". On 8 August, Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights released a statement criticizing excessive arrests and police brutality in connection with the previous day's mass arrest, which was signed by dozens of other Polish civil society groups. Police actions were criticized in a letter signed by dozens of former Solidarity activists, who compared it to the state persecution of anti-Communists in the Polish People's Republic. On 20 August, OKO.press published a letter from a number of prominent religious figures, including Michael Schudrich, the Chief Rabbi of Poland, stating that they disagreed with the pre-trial detention of Margot. The same day, French MEP Pierre Karleskind stated that he had recruited 64 MEPs to refer the matter of the 7 August mass arrest to the European Commission because "The European Union cannot stand idly by in the face of this new provocation." in August 2020More than 200 academics at universities in Poland and around the world signed a letter published on 12 August, including Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Roberto Esposito, and Jan T. Gross. The signatories "express our deep concern about the unprecedented attack on the LGBT + community in Poland" and "call on the Polish authorities to release Małgorzata Szutowicz immediately and to guarantee the rights of LGBT + people". On 18 August, 75 celebrities including Ed Harris, Pedro Almodóvar, James Norton, Slavoj Žižek, and Margaret Atwood published an open letter (addressed to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission) in Gazeta Wyborcza. The letter asks the European Commission "to take immediate steps to defend core European values – equality, non-discrimination, respect for minorities – which are being blatantly violated in Poland" and calls upon the Polish government "to hold accountable those who are responsible for unlawful and violent arrests of August 7, 2020" and "to stop targeting sexual minorities". As of 17 August, neither von der Leyen nor Charles Michel, president of the European Council, has made a statement on the incident. On 2 September, the police crackdown was discussed by the Sejm's internal affairs committee. A representative of the police did not answer all questions posed by opposition MPs, refusing to say why it was necessary to arrest the demonstrators. The events have been dubbed "Polish Stonewall" by some LGBTQ activists and media, in an analogy to the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York. == See also ==