The Anti-Discrimination law passed in parliament close to midnight on Tuesday night with 69 out of 120 MPs supporting it, mainly from the ruling alliance based around the Social Democrats. No MPs voted against it. This law was originally passed by the Social Democrat-led majority in 2019, marking a big victory for the human rights, as for the first time it included sexual orientation as grounds for discrimination.

The previous governments led by the conservative right-wing VMRO DPMNE from 2006 to 2017 refused to include sexual orientation in the law.

However, the Constitutional Court struck down the law in May this year, to the dismay of LGBT organisations and human rights groups, ruling that it was not passed with a proper quorum in parliament. This prompted the Social Democrats’ leader Zoran Zaev, who at that time had stepped down from the prime ministerial post to allow the formation of a caretaker government to organise elections, to promise that he would reinstate the law as soon as his party won, which it did in July. Read more via Balkan Insight