Homophobia rife in EU: report A report says Europe's gay community are still afraid to show their sexuality in public. TWO-THIRDS of Europe's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community are still afraid to show their sexuality in public and a quarter have been victims of physical or verbal attacks, an EU report says. "Fear, isolation and discrimination are everyday phenomena for the LGBT community in Europe," the director of the European Union's Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), Morten Kjaerum, wrote in the report, which was released on Friday for the International Day Against Homophobia. The online survey, described as the largest of its kind, questioned about 93,000 people in the European Union's 27 member states plus Croatia, which is to join the bloc in July. Just over a quarter (26 per cent) of the respondents said that they had been physically or verbally assaulted during the past five years. Transgenders suffered particularly, with 28 per cent saying they had been attacked or threatened more than three times in the past 12 months because of their sexuality, the report said. The average figure across Europe was 32 per cent. EU Commissioner for Justice and Fundamental Rights Viviane Reding told journalists in The Hague that the report showed "that things are not going right." "The legislation in place in members states is not really applied in practical terms and LGBT people are afraid to go to court or to the police because they're afraid to be discriminated against a second time," she said. "There is a lot of nationalistic, populistic thinking behind all this," she said. About 300 politicians and experts met in The Hague on Friday to discuss measures to fight homophobia within the EU. Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN's Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, said in Geneva that the report showed that "discrimination is still very much there." "I'm not that surprised by the figures that have come out in the EU study," he told journalists. But they are shocking, and clearly there's a very long way to go in removing all forms of discrimination targeted against LGBT people.