Pride parade

The Gay Lesbian Info Center (GLIC) NGO has announced that the security provided during Belgrade Pride Parade in October cost citizens of Serbia EUR 305,000.

Gay activists took the streets of Montenegro's capital Podgorica on Sunday in a parade demanding rights granted to sexual minorities - and others rights still out of reach - to be implemented by the Montenegrin authorities.

The third LGBT Pride march in the Montenegrin capital takes place on Sunday, after being postponed in October when anti-government protests erupted in Podgorica.

Click here for live updates from the Montenegro pride parade.

The NGO organizing the parade, Queer Montenegro, said it had decided to change the route from the one used during the previous two years.

The U.S. State Department's first-ever Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) people, Randy Berry, has expressed the U.S.'s concern over the police crackdown on the annual Pride March in Istanbul on June 28. 

Volkan Ertit, an academic popularly known for his books 'Secularism' and 'The Age of Concerned Conservatives,' argues that Turkish people are becoming less pious. 'Turkey is shifting away from religion,' Ertit says, citing changing attitudes to a series of social issues. Speaking to daily Hürriyet, Ertit listed 11 criteria supporting his thesis.

Veteran British rockstar Elton John on Sept. 12 said Ukraine still had "a long way to go" in its treatment of the gay, bisexual and transgender community at a conference in Kyiv.

This year's Belgrade Pride Week will start on September 14 while the main Pride march will be September 20, the organizers announced on Thursday.

Goran Miletic, one of the organizers, said that they expected few obstacles in organizing this year's event, but added that public opinion towards same-sex relations was slow to change in Serbia.

Dalibor Djordjevic, a member of the Serbian Gendarmerie special police unit, told the Higher Court in Belgrade on Monday that the prime minister's brother Andrej Vucic hit him in the face while trying with three companions to break through police lines during a gay pride parade on September 28, 2014.

Montenegrin NGOs LGBT Forum Progress and Hiperion announced on Sunday that the first ever Gay Pride march in the town of Niksic will be held in September under the slogan "Stop fascism - freedom to the people". 

Thousands of Israelis attended demonstrations across the country on August 1, two days after an ultra-Orthodox Jew stabbed six people at Jerusalem's gay pride parade, leaving one teenager in critical condition.