The European Commission announced this Friday (15) the decision to take Hungary to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), due to the adoption of a law that discriminates against people on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity.
Proposed by Fidesz, the party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in June 2021, the law prohibits the dissemination of what the legend calls “promotion of homosexuality and gender change in schools”.
The offensive against LGBT rights is part of Orbán’s Christian and conservative political project, which promotes successive attacks on this community, often associating it with pedophilia and pornography. The approved amendment prohibits anyone under the age of 18 from being exposed to pornographic content or any content that encourages gender reassignment and homosexuality, including advertisements.
In December 2020, a decision by the Hungarian Parliament amending the country’s Constitution defined “family” as “based on marriage and the relationship between parents and children”. According to the modified text, “the mother is a woman, the father a man”, and the children must be brought up in a conservative spirit. In practice, Hungarian law now definitively prohibits the adoption of children by LGBT couples.
Orbán’s government has also stepped up its anti-LGBT rhetoric by banning transgender people, who do not identify with their assigned gender at birth, from altering their personal documents. The law passed in May 2020 replaces the category “sex” in the civil registry with “sex assigned at birth”, defined as “biological sex based on primary sex characteristics and chromosomes”.
In reaction to the discriminatory legislation, the European Commission found that it “violates the fundamental rights of people — in particular, LGBTQIA+ people — and, in relation to these fundamental rights, the values of the EU”, according to a statement.
The decision to refer the case to the CJEU, highlighted the Commission, is the foreseen step in the infringement process started in July 2021 and which began with a formal letter from Brussels to Budapest.
The Hungarian authorities claim that the legislation is only intended to protect children and minors.
For the bloc’s executive, the protection of children is “an absolute priority in the EU”, but the Hungarian law contains “provisions that are not justified on the basis of the protection of these fundamental interests and are disproportionate”.
In the Commission’s view, this Hungarian law “identifies and attacks content that promotes or portrays what is called ‘divergence of self-identity corresponding to sex at birth, gender reassignment or homosexuality’ for minors.”
The Commission also announced on Friday that it would take Hungary to European court for “infringing EU telecommunications regulations” by rejecting the Klubradio network’s request for the use of radio spectrum “for very questionable reasons”.
Klubradio is a Budapest radio station seen as opposing the government, on the left of the political spectrum.
In a specific statement, the bloc’s Executive expressed its conviction that Hungary “violates EU law by applying disproportionate and non-transparent conditions to the renewal of rights to use Klubradio’s radio spectrum”.
Hungary, the note adds, has applied the relevant rules “in a disproportionate and discriminatory manner”. “By its conduct, Hungary also violated the freedom of expression enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights,” he said.
For the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, “in the EU, the largest democratic space in the world, no free radio should be taken off the air for non-objective reasons or based on a discriminatory administrative procedure”.
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