Charlie Gard was just two months old when he was admitted to London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital with breathing difficulties in October 2016. He would remain there up until the day before his death in July 2017, when the High Court ruled – against the wishes of his parents – that his life support machine should be switched off as the brain damage caused by his rare genetic disorder was too severe for any hope of successful treatment.

Gard’s case captured the attention of Agenda Europe, a network of more than 400 ultra-conservatives, who had spent the previous four years working together to oppose abortion, equal marriage, divorce and contraception, and had links to the Kremlin, Donald Trump and far-right MPs across Europe.

One member of Agenda Europe emailed others to encourage them to target the British authorities and the hospital, a month before doctors switched off Gard’s life support. Three weeks after the call for action, the Metropolitan Police was forced to launch an investigation into a torrent of death threats and abuse targeted at the hospital staff, including on social media.

Another member, Gregor Puppinck, of the European Centre for Law and Justice, responded to the email by Toni Brandi, of Italian anti-abortion organisation Pro Vita, to reassure members that his organisation had sent the case right to the top of the United States’ government.

The centre’s chief counsel, Jay Sekulow, had “intervened with Trump” on Gard’s case, Puppinck’s email said. That same day, in July 2017, then-US president went on to tweet that he wanted to help the British infant – an unusual step for a head of state in another country. Trump’s office did not respond to openDemocracy’s request for comment.

These leaked emails are just two of thousands exchanged between Agenda Europe members that have been seen by openDemocracy and a small group of European journalists.

They reveal for the first time how US, Russian and European anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ activists and politicians were in constant contact, offering support on local and national campaigns. The group’s actions include campaigning on referendums that successfully prevented equal marriage rights, challenging calls to end gender-based violence, and influencing the rise of anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ feelings and policy-making in multiple European countries.

As the following shows, these emails illustrate the emergence of a coherent and organised counter-narrative to the liberal world-view that was, until recently, generally espoused by an increasing number of democracies around the world. Agenda Europe, and its successor, Vision Network, served as a gathering place where conservative thought in its many disparate strands came together into a coherent worldview.

Austrian MP Gudrun Kugler, one of several elected politicians active in the network, told openDemocracy: “It is democratically legitimate to be pro-life, even if you personally disagree. It is democratically legitimate to connect with others who call themselves pro-life.”

Less than a year after Gard’s death, members had honed in on the tragic case of another seriously ill British toddler, Alfie Evans, whose parents were in legal battles to continue his treatment against the advice of doctors.

Staff members at Spanish anti-gender advocacy group CitizenGO weighed in. Eszter Zaymus-Schittil, the group’s campaigns director in Hungary, urged members to sign its petition to support the Evans family, while its founder Ignacio Arsuaga said the British state saw Evans as their “property”.

CitizenGO did not respond to our request for comment.

Other Agenda Europe emails asked members to look into the political backgrounds of the judges who would be ruling on Evans’ case. Aleksander Stepkowski of Poland’s Catholic legal organisation Ordo Iuris responded by claiming, without any evidence, that one justice, Anthony Hayden, was an “LGBT activist”.

Members often used racist and homophobic language when discussing UK issues. Other emails theorised on how women who had abortions should be punished, or praised Russian President Vladimir Putin’s laws that de-facto decriminalised domestic abuse in Russia.

Catholic influencer Edmund Adamus wrote to the group to warn that the UK had become “Eurabia” following news that a Christian NHS worker lost her appeal after being found guilty by her employer of “harassing and bullying” a Muslim colleague.

Adamus told openDemocracy that he “was aware” of Agenda Europe’s activities but “not involved in any official capacity.” He said he “does not recall” the email mentioned or the exchange.

Luca Volontè, a CitizenGO board member and the founder of Italian anti-abortion organisation Novae Terrae Foundation, replied on the same thread, saying that the “agloarabian [sic] spirit will infect all Europe” and it is “infecting UK court decisions”.

Other members labelled LGBTQ+ people as “sodomites” who were pursuing a “lifestyle” choice, and claimed gender studies is “Cultural Marxist propaganda designed to subvert culture”. Cultural Marxism is a term closely associated with far-right, antisemitic conspiracy theories.

One of the coordinators of the network was ADF International, the European arm of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom, designated as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Centre for their relentless campaigning against LGBTQ+ rights.

When ADF International’s Laurence Wilkinson emailed the group asking for observations about the UK lawyers standing to become judges on the European Court of Human Rights, one member accused one candidate of being part of the “homo lobby”, a term frequently deployed.

International collaboration

The network offered a space for activists, lawyers and academics to collaborate with politicians in order to achieve their anti-gender aims. This included offering advice to political figures from Eastern Europe on how to prevent the ratification of the Istanbul Convention to tackle men’s violence against women. Members celebrated when Latvia and Bulgaria did not ratify the convention.

Irish Catholic activists, meanwhile, sought advice on how to shape Ireland’s abortion laws after it was decriminalised in 2018. The same year, CitizenGO’s Arsuaga asked for information on Poland’s abortion laws, which are among the strictest in Europe, as “there is a political party that wants to study these Polish laws to use them to approach abortion zero” in Spain.

CitizenGO, which counted many of its staff among Agenda Europe members, works closely with Spain’s far-right VOX party, which wants to ban abortion. Emails criticised openDemocracy’s previous reporting on the network’s members, including the close relationship between Spain’s CitizenGO and VOX.

In the UK, the senior executive officer of Right to Life UK, Alisdair Hungerford-Morgan, shared job adverts for a Pro-Life Research Unit based in Westminster, and in 2019 alerted the network of a “strong push” from the UK government to “introduce abortion law in Northern Ireland and drastically change abortion legislation in England/Wales.” Abortion was decriminalised in Northern Ireland that year.

A 2017 Agenda Europe summit, at which Hungerford-Morgan was listed as speaking, featured a section on how to build such a unit in parliaments.

Austrian MP Gudrun Kugler emailed fellow Agenda Europe members “asking for your expertise” on “what does a Parliament need to legislate in order to remove radical gender ideology” after she was elected to the Austrian parliament in 2017. The European Christian Political Movement’s Leo van Doesburg, and CitizenGO were among those that responded to her request.

Louise McCudden, the UK head of external affairs at the pro-choice charity MSI Reproductive Choices, said openDemocracy’s findings reveal how shadowy groups work together to lobby for an anti-abortion agenda that does not have majority public support.

“These groups use money and tactics from overseas, taking advantage of the increasingly turbulent political climate to push for policies which drastically roll back gender equality – and for which they know they would never get democratic support in an open debate,” McCudden explained.

The leaked emails also reveal how Agenda Europe members pursued other strategies, which were less focused on specific campaigns, to frame the debate around LGBTQ+ rights.

Marianna Orlandi, from the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), urged the network to “MOCK” LGBTQ+ activists. Austin Ruse, her boss at C-Fam, a Catholic charity that has been designated a ‘hate group’ by the Southern Law Poverty Centre, responded agreeing: “We need more mockery.”

After learning about this investigation, C-Fam published false claims about openDemocracy on its website, including that openDemocracy had “hacked” Agenda Europe’s emails. Ruse responded to our request for comment by writing: “Fuck off.”

The US-Russia connection

Ruse was just one of Agenda Europe’s prominent US members.

Others included Brian Brown from the World Congress of Families (WCF), Sharon Slater, a Mormon activist best known for her work campaigning against LGBTQ+ rights in Africa, and disgraced Trump lawyer John Eastman. The three exchanged emails with Ruse discussing how to use Trump’s win to clamp down on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights in Europe and Africa.

Slater, the founder of Family Watch International, was a vocal member of the group. The leaked emails show she regularly asked the network to share her content, offered advice on PR, and solicited advice on how best to push against gender rights.

The network also had multiple Russian links, with Ruse thanking the Russian Federation for hosting a “joyful reception” for half a dozen Agenda Europe members in 2016. Brown’s WCF co-founded a Russian organisation called FamilyPolicy.Ru, which was run by Alexey Komov and Pavel Parfentiev, both employed by sanctioned Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev.

Both Komov and Parfentiev were members of Agenda Europe, and worked with CitizenGO and WCF.

Agenda Europe members would often praise Russia for its anti-gender policies, and spread disinformation about its actions in Ukraine. CitizenGO’s then-CEO, Alvaro Zulueta, celebrated Putin in a 2016 email that proclaimed “Viva Russia”. His colleague Parfentiev sent a 2016 email to Agenda Europe to dismiss claims of an “existing ‘Russian invasion’ in Ukraine” as “groundless myths”. The emails were sent two years after Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

Kugler, the Austrian MP, told openDemocracy that “there has never been, not before the illegal invasion and not afterwards, a Russia-endorsing tendency in this platform.”

Agenda Europe closed in 2019, only to rebrand as the Vision Network according to a 2019 email sent by ADF International’s Sophia Kuby. Its influence is still being felt in the UK via its alumni's links to anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ MPs.

UK Conservative MP Miriam Cates, for example, spoke at a 2023 event alongside WCF’s Brown and other leading Agenda Europe members. Both she and her Conservative Party colleague Danny Kruger also sit on the advisory board of the anti-rights ARC Forum advisory board alongside Kugler.

openDemocracy has also revealed how Irish MEP Mairead McGuinness planned to increase religious lobbying in the European Parliament – another investigation met with anger in the Google group. McGuinness’s former adviser was a vocal presence in Agenda Europe.

“Agenda Europe was an informal network of individuals and organisations working on fundamental freedoms and basic human rights to exchange ideas,” Kuby told openDemocracy.

“Members did not agree on everything,” she added, describing the email contents as “a free exchange of ideas”.