Social Exclusion of Sexual Minorities in Croatia

At the end of 2013 and in 2014, Croatia was marked by two very different changes in the status of sexual minorities. Firstly, same-sex partners were banned from the institution of marriage by a constitutional referendum. Secondly, the new Life Partnership Act provided the same-sex partners with most marital rights, except the joint-adoption right. This clearly illustrates conflicted trends of Croatian society. On one hand, improvements in the status of sexual minorities could have been noted as early as in 1970s and 1980s. After a break in these positive trends in the 1990s, the status of sexual minorities was particularly improved in the 2000s. Nevertheless, many of these positive changes were not accompanied by changes in the hetero-normative and homophobic practices of the Croatian society. This becomes evident in the overview of selected aspects of social exclusion of sexual minorities in all four systems of social exclusion (the democratic and legal system, the labour market, the welfare system, and the family and community system) that is, in this paper, primarily based on the results of the 2012 EU LGBT study, and complemented with the results of recent Croatian LGBT-related studies