London – A leaked memo from the US Embassy in Paris, to the State Department in Washington, has revealed that French President Nicolas Sarkozy lobbied Russian President Vladimir Putin on the “violent repression of a recent gay rights parade in Moscow.” The parade took place in 2007.
The memo followed a dinner meeting on the evening of June 12, 2007, between Undersecretary Burns from the US Department of State, and Gerard Araud, the political director of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In the secret memo published by WikiLeaks about a meeting between the presidents of France and Russia, a French advisor is reported as saying, “Sarkozy [was] seeking to develop a positive relationship with Putin, but without significant success to date. In their meeting, Sarkozy had raised with Putin human rights concerns, including the situation in Chechnya, the violent repression of a recent gay rights parade in Moscow and the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya. Putin reacted by attacking human rights (prison conditions) in France.”
This meeting was shortly after violence erupted at the Moscow Gay Pride on May 27, 2007. A United Kingdom human rights activist, Peter Tatchell, was a victim of unprovoked violence when he was punched in the face by an anti-gay thug. The Moscow police could not identify the assailant despite TV footage and press photos of the assault. Tatchell later had this to say about the assault, “There is no rule of law in Moscow. The right to protest does not exist. This is not a democracy. Today’s protest was about much more than gay rights. We were defending the right to freedom of expression and peaceful protest for all Russians, gay and straight. The ban on Moscow Gay Pride is one aspect of a much wider attack on civil society and human rights. It is evidence of a failed transition from communism to demo-cracy and of a rising trend towards autocracy and authoritarianism.”
Nikolai Alekseev, a spokesman for Moscow Gay Pride, said that French journalists had told him that President Sarkozy had mentioned the Moscow Pride 2007 violence to President Putin. “Now we’ve got official confirmation of this information in the US memos published on the WikiLeaks site,” he told UK Gay News.
