BUS 449 Post 10

Dear Reader,

Welcome back from a week break! I hope you enjoyed it. I decided to go on vacation and visited the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Everything was very nice: food, weather, towns that I went to. Two days before leaving the place and going back to the AUBG, I was walking around the town and came across a rainbow-colored stairs in a small park. I was told that it was painted earlier this year when Cypriot government passed the law that decriminalized homosexuality. Now, that sounded very interesting to me.

I did some research and here is what I found. In Northern Cyprus, only homosexual men used to be persecuted with three years in prison while female homosexuality was not considered illegal. As you know, Cyprus used to be a British colony, so such laws were inherited from the colonial legal code. After the island became independent and later divided in two, southern (Greece) part of Cyprus was first to decriminalize homosexuality in order to get accepted to the EU. In Turkey homosexuality was legal since mid-nineteenth century but now, due to a very socially conservative population newly elected officials promised to think about introducing anti-homophobia law that will persecute violence against LGBT community. By decriminalizing homosexuality, Northern Cyprus is now standing on the same line with Turkey and Southern Cyprus. By signing the bill in February this year, Northern Cyprus became the last one in Europe to legalize same-sex relations between consenting adults.