44% of respondents in a national public opinion poll said that they would refuse to have LGBT people as their neighbours, 34% said that they would not accept LGBT people as their colleagues at work (61% in 2006). These are the numbers of the National public opinion poll conducted in September-November 2008 by order of the Ministry of Labour and Welfare of Lithuania, reports Lithuanian Courier.

Lithuanians also are most intolerant to the Gipsies (49% of people would not like to neighbour Gipsies, 38% - refuse to work with them), then to Chinese (3rd place on the scale of intolerance) and to Africans.

Lithuanian authorities do whatever they can in order to meet the EU standards on LGBT rights. Last autumn H.E. Petras Vaitekunas, the Head of the Lithuanian Foreign Office, had frankly revealed that they "were one of the most anti-gay states in EU and they had to do something with it". He stated that such homophobic tendency was the heritage of the past when previous generations including those who had lived in the USSR, believed that homosexuality was a perversion and negative phenomenon.

In April 2008 Council of Europe for the first time ever since that country broke up with the USSR expressed its serious concern with the human and gay rights situation in Lithuania. However, Lithuania has adopted a law that prohibits discrimination on the grounds of the sexual orientation in the sphere of labour market. But since then a little or nothing has changed ...

Translated byYerdna Bananes