Gay rights activists protested in defiance of a City Hall ban on Sunday, marching in front of the Moscow State Conservatory and unfurling a banner demanding greater rights for gays and lesbians from the window of an apartment on Tverskaya Ulitsa, just blocks from the Kremlin.

Dozens of activists from Gay Russia, led by organization head Nikolai Alexeyev, held a series of separate protests throughout the city to try to avoid exposing protesters to some of the violence that accompanied the larger gay pride parades in 2006 and 2007.

We wanted to make this pride [day] different from the last two years, Alexeyev said in English. We didn't want to have any more beatings in the street. We just want to show everyone that we are normal people.

City Hall rejected more than 100 requests by the group to hold their annual gay pride parade in May, citing security concerns. Mayor Yury Luzhkov is a fierce opponent of the parade and his office has denied every parade request since 2005, a move upheld as constitutional by the Moscow City Court in April 2007.

The protests were much more peaceful than in recent years. Despite the lack of violence, the mood on Sunday was hardly festive.

Screaming anti-gay protesters threw garbage and rotten eggs at the apartment on Tverskaya. One woman was detained after lifting a banner that said, Mr. President, stop these sodomites from leading us down to the path to death!

A massive security presence was visible early in the afternoon, as hundreds of regular officers and OMON riot police lined Moscow's main thoroughfare, blocking access to Tverskaya Ploshchad.

We're protecting the children, said a police officer, who refused to give his name. Do you think it's proper for [gays] to come out into the streets like this? Well, I don't.

Moscow’s mayor, who has banned gay rights parades in the past, vowed Thursday to continue his ban on what he called sexual minority propaganda, according to Russian news agencies.

Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who has called homosexuality satanic, said City Hall has banned, and will continue to ban, the propaganda of the views of sexual minorities. Those views, he is quoted as saying, could become one of the factors for the spread of HIV.

City Hall has rejected repeated requests by public organizations to draw attention to gay rights with parades. Attempts by activists to defy the ban have ended violently in some cases and petered out in others.

A gay parade planned to coincide with the Eurovision Song Contest, hosted by the Russian capital, has been banned by Moscow because it will destroy morals, a spokesman for the city's Mayor said.

The Moscow government is saying: Moscow has never had gay parades and it never will, said Mayor Yuri Luzhkov's spokesman, Sergei Tsoi. Not only do they destroy morals within our society, but they consciously provoke disorder.

Parade organiser Nikolai Alekseyev said the event would take place: This is our right and it is guaranteed by the constitution. No official, including the Moscow Mayor, has the right to violate it.

But Mr Luzhkov's spokesman said any attempts to hold an unsanctioned gay parade would be toughly stopped by law enforcement agencies in accordance with the law.

Update: Tatchell Arrested

17th May 2009. See article from independent.co.uk

Riot police in Moscow ruthlessly broke up a peaceful gay rights protest, at times using violence to detain the participants. The city authorities had banned the march, timed to coincide with the supposedly gay-friendly Eurovision Song Contest, but around 30 activists decided to protest anyway, changing the venue at the last minute.

They gathered near Moscow's main university, chanting slogans and unveiling banners protesting against homophobia in Russian society. Most of the demonstrators, including the organiser, Nikolai Alexeev, and British gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, were bundled into police vans and driven away. The city's mayor has previously referred to gays as Satanists and the authorities claimed the march had been banned to prevent moral degradation.

Tatchell was released without charge in the afternoon after the British Embassy requested consular access to him, but most of the other participants in the gay demonstration were still being held by police.

A planned gay rights parade will not be able to take place in Moscow after the usual ruling by its mayor, Yuri Lushkov, the Itar Tass news agency reported .

Lushkov, who has taken anti-gay stances in the past, called the Gay Parade a blasphemy as he announced that he would not let it go forward as planned in Europe's biggest city.

We have never approved this kind of parade before and we are not going to do it in the future, said Lushkov, who said he was exercising the will of Muscovites. He also pronounced rallies and demonstrations by gay and lesbian groups as Satanic dealings.

Organisers of last year's first-ever Moscow Gay Pride have today formally taken their case of the ban by the authorities in the Russian capital of both a parade and a picket to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

This follows the unsuccessful appeals against the bans through the Russian court system, which are now exhausted, as far as requirements of European Court's jurisprudence are concerned.

The organizers are considering appealing pride bans to the Russian Supreme Court parallel to their European Court application though it will not effect the consideration of the case in Strasbourg.

At the same time, Moscow Pride organisers announced that this year's Moscow Pride will definitely be going ahead, and that an application for a parade will be made in accordance with Russian law, two weeks before the event, scheduled for Sunday May 27, the day in 1993 when homosexuality was decriminalised in Russia.

The application to the European Court of Human Rights combines two cases: one concerning the ban by Moscow authorities of the gay pride march and the second concerning the banning of the alternative pride picket, both scheduled for May 27, 2006.

In the application, the litigants claim that in denying permission to stage both the march and the picket the Russian Federation breached Article 11 (right to freedom of peaceful assembly), Article 13 (right to effective court protection) and Article 14 (discrimination ban) in conjunction with Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Russia is a signatory.