Twenty years on from the fall of the Iron Curtain, Eastern Europe's homosexuals say they still face a tough struggle for equal rights, plus the kind of verbal abuse and violence rarely seen in the West anymore.

The picture is similar from the Baltic to the Balkans, campaigners say, with homosexuality remaining taboo despite the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships that were banned by communist regimes.

"Homophobia is taking a new turn,” said Vladimir Simonko, head of the Gay League in the Baltic state of Lithuania. “It's becoming institutionalized."

Lithuania has been spotlighted over controversial legislation voted in by its conservative-dominated parliament in July, which is due to come into force in March 2010 unless President Dalia Grybauskaite manages to overturn it.

This new law bars the public dissemination of information deemed favourable to homosexuality on the grounds that it could harm the mental health and physical, intellectual and moral development of minors.

"When lawmakers adopt homophobic laws, nobody can be certain that groups of people who hate us won't take that as a green light to move against us," said Simonko.

Same-sex relations were decriminalised in Lithuania in 1993 -- two years after the country won independence from the crumbling Soviet Union, which banned homosexuality.

Bans and bashing

But opposition to gay rights remains entrenched in Lithuania, where the vast majority of the population of 3.3 million is Roman Catholic. Polls show that most Lithuanians consider homosexuality a perversion.

In 2007 and 2008, local authorities banned EU-sponsored anti-discrimination events -- Lithuania joined the bloc in 2004 -- and they have also repeatedly barred local campaigners from holding public gatherings.

The equally Catholic Poland, meanwhile, was condemned by the European Court of Human Rights after Gay Pride parades were banned in Warsaw in 2004 and 2005 by the then-mayor, Lech Kaczynski, who is now the country's president.