The European Parliament’s Brussels headquarters will host the VII Transatlantic Summit on February 2nd-3rd. The event is organized by the anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ group Political Network for Values, and will bring together dozens of politicians, activists, and anti-rights organizations from Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
For two days, the offices of one of the European Union’s two legislative bodies will provide a forum for activists who support so-called conversion therapy, advocate for strict abortion restriction, link LGBTQ+ people to pedophilia, have been convicted of political violence against transgender lawmakers, and promote xenophobic narratives, including the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. The gathering will also include the Ugandan MP Lucy Akello, who helped pass legislation imposing the death penalty or life imprisonment on LGBTQ+ individuals.
Several U.S.-based organizations are involved in the summit. Among the American sponsors are the Heritage Foundation, Family Watch International (FWI), Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI) and the Tholos Foundation. It will serve as a platform to promote their agenda under the banner of “free speech,” including by leveraging the murder of Charlie Kirk, founder Turning Point USA.
Promotional image for the VII Transatlantic Summit with logos of its sponsoring organizations. (Source: PNfV).
The summit’s organizers say that Kirk’s assassination “highlighted the serious challenges faced today by those who defend human dignity and fundamental freedoms.”
The event will be held under the banner “Free speech vs regulated speech. Strengthening the pillars of democracy.” According to the group behind the event, “promoting and protecting life, family, and freedoms are too often considered positions that must be silenced, sometimes with censorship disguised as regulation, other times with violence.”
Although the Digital Services Act (DSA) is not explicitly mentioned in the program, and the agenda relies on vague session titles such as “The Role of the Parliament: legislating Without Silencing” or “A Right Prior to the State,” the legislation looms large over the event. The DSA broadly regulates certain types of online content in the EU. It has become a focal point for criticism from the global far right and the Trump administration, who portray the law as a form of censorship.
The DSA requires social media platforms to remove content that infringes the laws of EU member states, and makes social media algorithms more transparent to reduce the potential for spreading disinformation. However, for far-right actors, content moderation, particularly of hate speech, is framed as an assault on free speech and “religious freedom,” a narrative that in practice seeks to legitimize the targeting of specific communities, especially LGBTQ+ people and migrants.
Free Speech as a Political Tool
Some of the organizations sponsoring the summit have previously addressed this issue in the EU Parliament. In May 2025, ADFI organized an event titled “The Digital Services Act and Threats to Freedom of Expression” that included a panel discussing the “EU online censorship law.” Adina Portaru, ADFI’s senior counsel for Europe, who took part in that debate, will also be a speaker at the upcoming summit.
ADF International is the global branch of the U.S.-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a powerhouse legal organization that has pushed to eliminate access to contraception and abortion, and promoted the criminalization of sexual acts among consenting LGBTQ+ individuals. The group lobbies policymakers and governments to advance a Christian nationalist agenda and gained global notoriety in 2022 for its pivotal role behind the campaign that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, ending the U.S. constitutional right to abortion.
Musk tweeted in support of ADFI’s position on the DSA. (Source:X).
ADFI has publicly aligned itself with Elon Musk, the owner of X, against the DSA echoing Musk’s narrative that EU content moderation rules constitute an assault on “free of speech.”
The organization continues to back Musk even after the controversy surrounding Grok, X’s artificial intelligence chatbot, which generated more than one million sexualized images of women.
Summit-backing organizations have remained largely silent on Grok’s sexist content, despite their active role in digital regulation debates and restrictive positions on women’s rights.
European Far-Right Groups Backing the Summit
The event scheduled for February at the European Parliament is the seventh edition of the Transatlantic Summit. Previous editions have taken place in Bogotá, Budapest, Madrid, and New York, including at the United Nations headquarters.
The summit is organized by PNfV, a transnational lobbying platform that connects far-right actors and organizations worldwide. The network promotes a conservative Christian agenda that opposes LGBTQ+ rights, women’s bodily autonomy, and euthanasia, while defending a traditional family model.
PNfV is fiercely anti-abortion. Its ideological manifesto states that “euthanasia, like abortion, cannot be considered a right.” As part of its broader anti-rights agenda, PNfV also rejects same-sex marriage, asserting that “marriage is an institution between a man and a woman, where each contributes differently yet complementarily to the process of forming a family.” Through events such as the Transatlantic Summit, PNfV facilitates networking opportunities for political representatives and social leaders involved in the anti-rights movement.
In this year’s event, two far-right groups in the European Parliament are sponsoring the event: Patriots for Europe and the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR). Patriots for Europe includes parties such as Hungary’s Fidesz, France’s Rassemblement National, and Spain’s Vox. The ECR brings together parties including Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia, Poland’s Law and Justice, and France’s Identité Libertés.
Heritage as a Key U.S. Sponsor
Alongside its European sponsors, the summit is also backed by several U.S.-based organizations, reflecting the transatlantic network behind the event. Among them is the Heritage Foundation, which through this gathering continues to strengthen its relationships with anti-rights organizations and far-right political parties across Europe and the U.S. By doing so, it promotes the implementation of its extensive 900-page “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” known as Project 2025, a detailed blueprint for a future Trump administration that was drafted ahead of the 2024 election.
The Heritage Foundation will be represented at the event by Jay W. Richards, vice president of Social and Domestic Policy, and Grace Melton, senior associate for International Social Issues.
Several of the speakers expected to take part in the event. (Source: PNfV).
Another U.S.-based participant is Sharon Slater, president of Family Watch International, an anti-LGBTQ+ organization that seeks to influence international policy, particularly at the United Nations and across Africa. Slater has made false claims portraying LGBTQ+ people as disease-prone, “significantly more promiscuous,” and “significantly more likely to engage in pedophilia.” She was also deeply involved in the political organizing behind the infamous Uganda law that criminalized LGBTQ+ people.
One of the newest U.S. actors joining this bigoted network is the Tholos Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based organization that presents itself as an educational institution. According to its website, the non-profit was founded in 1985 at the request of President Ronald Reagan and is “dedicated to advancing the principles of economic liberty around the globe.”
The organization is led by executive director, Christopher Butler, who also serves, according to his Linkedin profile, as executive director of the conservative anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform.
A Transnational Network
The speaker lineup reflects a coordinated ecosystem of political actors and advocacy groups that work across borders to advance a shared anti-rights agenda. These groups include the Washington, D.C.-based Global Center for Human Rights (GCHR), active across Latin America; Abogados Cristianos (Christian Lawyers Association, AC) operating in Spain and Mexico; the European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ); and the Political Network for Values (PNfV), the organizing group itself.
The event at the European Parliament is scheduled to feature PNfV’s president Stephen Bartulica, a Croatian MEP from the far-right party Dom i Nacionalno Okupljanje (Home and National Rally, DOMiNO) and a member of the far-right Catholic movement Opus Dei.
The organization’s vice president, Rodrigo Iván Cortés, founder of Mexico’s Frente Nacional por la Familia (National Front for the Family), is also expected to participate. In 2023, Cortés was convicted for gender-based political violence against Mexican transgender Congresswoman Salma Luévano. From 2022 to 2024, PNfV was led by José Antonio Kast, the elected Chilean president.
Pushing Abortion Bans Beyond Borders
Beyond ADF International, the program also lists participants from international legal organizations that advance litigation strategies against women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. These include Neydy Casillas from the U.S.-based GCHR; Polonia Castellanos from the Spain-based Christian Lawyers; and Grégor Puppinck from the ECLJ, an affiliate of the American Center for Law & Justice, a Project 2025 supporter.
Both the ECLJ and the GCHR participated in strategic litigation before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights –in the landmark Manuela and Beatriz cases, respectively– supporting El Salvador’s near-total abortion ban. However, the Court found the Central American country responsible for Manuela’s death and for obstetric violence against Beatriz.
Another group scheduled to speak at the European Parliament is the Spain-based Christian Lawyers, an anti-abortion organization that works to restrict women’s reproductive rights. The group is rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ and opposes bans on so-called conversion therapy, a cruel “treatment” that tries to change sexual orientation or identity and has been described as akin to torture by a UN Special Rapporteur. Christian Lawyers also operates a Mexican chapter and is active in Latin America.
Identitarian and conservative participants
In this event, PNfV is also expected to host Dutch Identitarian and anti-immigration influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek. She has promoted the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which alleges that political elites are secretly orchestrating a “replacement” of the native white population with non-white immigrants.
On January 15, media outlets reported that the United Kingdom had revoked her visa-free travel access. In their decision, U.K. authorities stated that her presence in the country “is not considered to be conducive to the public good.”
The event brings together activists and political figures. According to the registration form reviewed by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, PNfV requires what they called “civil society leaders” to pay a €280 fee to fund events held outside the European Parliament.
Registration form for the summit. (Source: Google Forms)
Among the participating lawmakers is Lucy Akello, who will attend the Brussels gathering after having participated in previous Transatlantic Summits in Madrid (2024) and New York (2023). Akello is a member of the Ugandan Parliament who helped pass an anti-LGBTQ+ law that sets life imprisonment as the maximum penalty for homosexuality in Uganda.
The event will include Members of the European Parliament affiliated with far-right groups such as Patriots for Europe and the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR). Speakers include Hungary’s Kinga Gál and András László (Fidesz); Spain’s Santiago Abascal and Margarita de la Pisa (Vox); Italy’s Paolo Inselvini and Carlo Fidanza (Fratelli d’Italia). In addition, the lineup features Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s former prime minister and current president of the ECR Party.
The event reflects a broader transatlantic alignment. In addition to European and African far-right lawmakers, the European Parliament will host officials linked to conservative Latin American governments that promote anti-woman and anti-rights policies, including Víctor Verdún, Paraguay’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Raúl Latorre, President of the Paraguayan Chamber of Deputies, Argentine lawmakers Santiago Santurio and Nicolás Mayoraz of President Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party, and Ernesto Araújo, Brazil’s former foreign minister under Jair Bolsonaro.
The gathering will also feature Mexican senators Michel González Márquez and Lilly Tellez, as well as Fabiola Morales, Vice-Councilor of Lima Municipality (Peru).
With the participation of this constellation of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman actors, the European Parliament will serve on 2-3 February as a hub for debate, networking, and the development of coordinated anti-rights strategies across continents.
