the recent introduction of a near-total ban.One defendant, Elżbieta Podleśna, said when the trial opened in January that the 2019 action in Płock was spurred by an installation at the city’s St Dominic’s church that associated LGBTQ+ people with crime and sins.She and the other two activists — Anna Prus and Joanna Gzyra-Iskandar — faced up to two years of prison if found guilty.An LGBTQ+ rights group, Love Does Not Exclude, welcomed the ruling as a “breakthrough”.“This is a triumph for the LGBTQ+ resistance movement in the most homophobic country of the European Union,” it said.The image involved an alteration of Poland’s most revered icon, the Mother of God of Częstochowa, popularly known as the Black Madonna of Częstochowa.