Tens of thousands of people marched through Prague on Saturday for the high point of the Czech capital’s Pride celebrations.<\/p>\n
At the start of the parade, participants observed a minute’s silence in memory of the victims of the Berlin Pride attack two weeks ago.<\/p>\n
“As every year, the aim of the festival is to raise awareness of LGBT+ issues, to show how this community lives in the Czech Republic and that it is still waiting for equal rights,” said Kamila Fr\u00f6hlichova, director of the Prague Pride festival.<\/p>\n
She emphasized that the attack in Berlin once again highlighted the importance of Pride events. Hate does not begin with physical attacks, but with words and hate speech, she stressed.<\/p>\n
During the terrorist attack in Berlin on July 25, the Islamist attacker drove a van into a crowd of people and subsequently crashed the vehicle into a tree. One woman was killed and 31 people were injured, some seriously.<\/p>\n
In response to the attack in Berlin, the organizers of the Prague festival announced enhanced security measures. Hundreds of police officers and a de-escalation team accompanied the parade.<\/p>\n
Participants were also asked to carry banners by hand or to use plastic poles as wooden poles and broomsticks were to be avoided.<\/p>\n
As well as colourful clothing, some parade participants also wore sparkly make-up and carried balloons, mostly featuring rainbow motifs.<\/p>\n
The theme of this year’s week-long Pride festival was “Times are changing.”<\/p>\n
According to police reports, there were no major incidents, although a small group of counter-demonstrators also gathered along the route.<\/p>\n
The acronym LGBT+ stands for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and wider queer community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tens of thousands of people marched through Prague on Saturday for the high point of the Czech capital’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[18,47190,51424,51423,28172,8170],"class_list":["post-69087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-berlin","tag-berlin-pride","tag-parade-participants","tag-prague","tag-pride","tag-terrorist-attack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}