Russian Courts Declare Three LGBT Initiatives “Extremist” in Two Days

On April 24, the rights group Perviy Otdel said the Samara public organisation Irida had also been declared “extremist” and banned in Russia. The previous day, Reuters had reported similar rulings against Parni+ and the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives. That brought the total to three such rulings in two days.

Irida was a small activist group. It ran a page on VKontakte, assembled a mini-library of books on LGBT topics, and sent appeals to law enforcement bodies and State Duma deputies, including during debates on laws banning gender transition and so-called “LGBT propaganda.”

Lawyer Maxim Olenichev, who works with Perviy Otdel, said the Irida case was the first one in which the authorities began testing a new practice of branding specific LGBT initiatives “extremist” after the Supreme Court’s November 30, 2023 ruling. He said the case had been in court since November 2025, with seven hearings in total, and that by February 2026 similar cases had already appeared against eight more initiatives.

According to Olenichev, the key evidence in the Irida case was a so-called “criminological profile.” The Justice Ministry initially marked it for official use only, but the defence managed to gain access to it. He said the document treated Irida’s appeals to lawmakers and criticism of the “LGBT propaganda” law, described in one text as “absurd and unfounded,” as evidence of extremism. Earlier, Samara’s Promyshlenny District Court fined Irida president Artyom Fokin 450,000 roubles and banned him from administering websites for three years.

On April 23, the Zavodskoy District Court in the Oryol Region granted a Justice Ministry suit against the media project Parni+, while the Moscow City Court designated the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives as an “extremist” organisation, Mediazona reported and later separately detailed in the case of the Moscow center. Both organisations said they would continue their work, although the Moscow center said it would drop some offline events without participant anonymisation for security reasons. Parni+ said the ruling was another step toward criminalising LGBT visibility, independent journalism, and any public solidarity with the community.

The rulings continue the line that followed Russia’s 2023 ban on the so-called “international public LGBT movement.” Russian authorities have framed such measures as a defence of “traditional values.” On April 22, law enforcement officers also questioned staff at one of Russia’s largest publishing houses over possible “LGBT propaganda” in its book catalogue. In March, Human Rights Watch said Russian authorities were using the justice system as a tool to marginalise and censor LGBT people and their supporters, in blatant violation of freedom of expression, freedom of association, and nondiscrimination.