EU court rules Hungary’s LGBTQ law violates human rights

The European Union’s top court has ruled that anti-LGBTQ legislation implemented by the Hungarian government in 2021 breaches the bloc’s law.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) found on Tuesday that the Hungarian legislation runs contrary to EU law “on a number of separate levels”.
Victory in the case, deemed the largest human rights case in the bloc’s history as it was launched by the European Commission alongside 16 of 27 member states and the European Parliament, has been hailed as a “landmark”.

Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban insisted as he introduced the legislation five years ago that it was aimed at toughening punishments for child abuse, but it was then amended to ban the “promotion of homosexuality” to under-18s.

The legislation led to the banning of books, plays and films. Critics compared it to Russia’s harsh gay propaganda law of 2013, and called it out for stigmatising LGBTQ people and equating same-sex relations to paedophilia.

However, Orban’s “illiberal” regime continued to press the issue. Last year, it introduced new laws and a constitutional amendment that effectively banned the Budapest Pride march by declaring a determination to protect children from “sexual propaganda”.

However, 100,000 people took part in the event in defiance of the clampdown, the sheer weight of numbers leaving the government to back down.