LGBT 'safe space' shutdown hours before World Cup

A planned ‘safe space’ for ethnic-minority and LGBT football fans was reportedly shutdown in Russia over the weekend, just hours before the opening game of the World Cup.

The BBC reports the international Football Against Racism in Europe (Fare) had organised a Diversity House at a property in St Petersburg.

However, at the 11^th hour the owners of the property locked Fare organisers out and cancelled their contract.

“They asked us to leave the place very rudely, switched off the electricity and they explained nothing to us,” the BBC quotes a local organiser as saying.

Fare director Piara Powar has labelled the shutdown as a “political attack” on human rights by “powerful conservative political forces in Russia”.

Fare has since found a new location for its Diversity House in St Petersburg’s city centre.

Despite homosexuality being decriminalised in Russia in 1993, anti-gay sentiment remains.

In 2013, the Russian Duma passed a law that made “propaganda” of non-traditional sexual relationships among minors an offence, the BBC reports.