This year, the City of Zagreb is raising rainbow flags on public flagpoles in the city’s main squares. For the past 18 years, rainbow flags have been raised in Zagreb to mark IDAHOBIT. This year, however, marks the first time they are being raised as part of the City of Zagreb LGBTIQ Action Plan 2024–2026. This policy is the result of years of organizing, community work, and struggle by Zagreb’s queer community, which has spent decades insisting that our city belongs to everyone who lives here and everyone who comes here to build a life.

Rainbow flags on the city’s flagpoles are a reminder that our rights are never permanently secured. Without a collective struggle for the full realization of civil, social, and cultural rights, everything we have achieved so far, including symbolic gestures such as rainbow flags on public flagpoles, can be restricted or taken away.

The fight against homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, and interphobia requires transforming society as a whole, from the capital to the smallest towns and municipalities in Croatia. Croatia still lacks full legal and institutional protection of LGBTIQ rights, while political space for defending those rights continues to shrink under pressure from openly anti-LGBTIQ politics of the far right, as well as the political calculations of the so-called progressive left.

This is why Croatia still does not have:

  • marriage equality. Marriage must become a union between two people, regardless of their legal gender.
  • equal adoption rights for life partnerships. Life partnerships must be fully equal to marriage and common-law marriages in all rights and protections.
  • legal gender recognition based on self-determination. The change of gender markers in civil registries must be available without requiring approval from health councils, psychiatric diagnoses, or psychological gatekeeping. Every person must have the right, in accordance with the law, to change their legal gender marker solely on the basis of their own request and thereby exercise their right to private life and the free development of their personality.
  • a ban on conversion practices. Croatia must legally prohibit all forms of pseudoscientific and religious-fundamentalist practices aimed at changing, suppressing, or denying the sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression of LGBTIQ people.
  • protection of the bodily integrity of intersex people, especially intersex children. Croatia must legally prohibit medically unnecessary and irreversible interventions on intersex children until they are able to make a free and informed decision for themselves and provide legally valid consent.
  • national action plans that include concrete and measurable policies for the protection and promotion of LGBTIQ rights. For the first time in the past 15 years, the Croatian Government has omitted measures combating homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia from national anti-discrimination action plans. In doing so, the HDZ-led government is sending a clear political message that the protection of LGBTIQ rights is no longer even a formal priority of state human rights policies.

Every year on IDAHOBIT, various maps and rankings are published comparing European countries according to the level of LGBTIQ rights. Such comparisons and simplified media portrayals often create an image of “progressive” and “backward” countries, as though the lives of LGBTIQ people could be reduced to a score or a place on a ranking table.

Over the past 25 years, Croatia has undergone major social and political changes for our community: same-sex couples are now legally recognized as families, and trans people no longer have to undergo sterilization, genital surgery, or other irreversible medical interventions in order to change the gender marker in their documents. Violence against LGBTIQ people, despite the continuing failures of police and prosecutors to properly recognize and prosecute hate crimes, is today generally prosecuted as a hate crime, one of the most serious categories of criminal offense. The legal protections that have been achieved, and those we continue to demand, matter deeply. But legal recognition alone does not guarantee safety, dignity, or substantive equality in everyday life throughout Croatia.

Change does not happen because a map suggests that we should become a “progressive” society modeled after another one. Change happens when we organize collectively, persistently, and in solidarity to secure recognition and realization of rights for all, while resisting violence, discrimination, and institutional exclusion in everyday life.

Our LGBTIQ struggle must remain collective. Just as loudly as we defend our own rights, we must also raise our voices against the exploitation of domestic and migrant workers, against dehumanization, racism, and violence targeting the most vulnerable national and ethnic communities living among us, and against the latest attempts by those in power to criminalize the antifascist struggle and its symbols.

For the rights and freedom of all!

Long live IDAHOBIT!