Hungary’s new government has taken an important step toward dismantling a key discriminatory legacy of the Orbán era—the legal targeting of LGBT people. The job is not finished, however.
The government submitted legislation to Parliament on September 14 to remove several provisions of the 2021 so-called “child protection” law that restrict the “portrayal” or “promotion” of sexual and gender diversity in content accessible to children. The proposed changes remove the restrictions from laws relating to child protection, media, advertising, and education.
The reforms follow an April judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union finding that Hungary’s legal restrictions stigmatized and marginalized LGBT people and violated EU law. The court found that Hungary could not invoke the best interests of the child to justify restrictions that discriminated against LGBT people and violated fundamental rights.
The government deserves credit for moving to comply with that judgment and abandoning the false and deeply damaging equation of LGBT people with threats to children that underpinned the 2021 law. The proposed legislation instead focuses child-protection restrictions on substantively harmful material, including pornography, sexual exploitation, grooming, and age-inappropriate sexual content.
However the government’s plans leave other discriminatory provisions in Hungarian law intact. The bill removes restrictions on the “portrayal” or “promotion” of homosexuality and gender diversity from several laws, but leaves unchanged section 5/A of the Family Protection Act, which contains similar restrictions on content accessible to children. Nor does bill address discriminatory language in the Fundamental Law (Hungary’s constitution) or restrictions in the Freedom of Assembly Act that have been used to prohibit Pride and other LGBT-related assemblies.
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU), Háttér Society, and Amnesty International Hungary jointly welcomed the proposed changes and called for further amendments to fully dismantle the discriminatory legal framework. This goal goes beyond cleaning up Hungary’s statute book but includes reform of Article XVI of the Fundamental Law that provides a constitutional basis for anti-LGBT restrictions and the legislation used to restrict Pride marches.
The Tisza government has a parliamentary supermajority and while dismantling much of the Orbán-era anti-LGBT legal machinery is worth applauding, the government needs to finish what it started. It should amend the remaining discriminatory provisions, including the Fundamental Law, and remove any legal basis for restrictions targeting LGBT people and their rights.
