Hungary Votes to Remove Anti-LGBTQ Provisions From Child Protection Law

Hungarian lawmakers have voted to remove anti-LGBTQ provisions from a 2021 child protection law introduced under former nationalist leader Viktor Orban.

The bill to amend the law was passed by parliament on Tuesday, with 139 lawmakers voting in favour and 51 against, marking the first major rollback of Orban’s restrictions targeting the LGBTQ community since pro-European Union Prime Minister Peter Magyar took office in May.

Under the revised legislation, the government will no longer ban the “portrayal” or “promotion” of sexual and gender diversity in content accessible to children.

Instead, the law will focus on protecting minors from material that could “seriously impair the child’s physical, intellectual, emotional or moral development”.

“Fundamentally, our goal was to move away from a flawed paradigm, linking child protection in any way to sexual orientation or gender identities, and shift to a framework that is truly about children and protecting children,” Szilvia Gyurko, State Secratary at the Ministry of Social and Family Affairs told AFP.

Magyar won a landslide victory in April elections, ending a 16-year stretch in power for Orban, who had taken one of Europe’s most restrictive approaches to LGBTQ rights.

The European Union welcomed Tuesday’s vote as an “important signal of commitment for our common values” after Orban’s restrictions were found to be in breach of EU rules.

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Magyar did not address LGBTQ rights during his election campaign, though he has since struck a friendly tone and indicated willingness to revise some Orban-era policies.

But ahead of the vote on Tuesday, he cast the planned changes not as a restoration of rights but a strengthening of child-protection rules “regardless of sexual orientation”.

Orban’s Fidesz party voted against the amendment,accusing the government of “neutering” the original law due to EU pressure.

However, the governing Tisza party has a comfortable two-thirds majority, which enabled it to pass the bill without any opposition support.

– ‘Homophobic and transphobic’ –

Orban’s government had gradually rolled back LGBTQ rights in the name of “child protection” in Hungary, starting in 2020 by barring the legal recognition of transgender people’s gender identity.

A child protection bill was introduced in 2021 amending multiple statutes with the stated aim of cracking down on paedophilia.

However, it also banned the “promotion” of homosexuality and gender transition to under-18s.

This outraged activists and leaders across the EU who criticised it for stigmatising LGBTQ people and equating same-sex relations to paedophilia.

Last year, the legislation was amended to also serve as the basis for banning annual Pride marches.

In April, the EU’s top tribunal, the European Court of Justice, found that the 2021 law violated “the very identity” of the bloc.

Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Tamas Dombos from the Hatter Society rights group told AFP the change in the law was “definitely an important and positive step forward”.

The changes remove “homophobic and transphobic provisions” from the law in compliance with the ECJ’s ruling, Dombos said.

– ‘Still a lot to do’ –

“But there is still a lot to do,” he added.

“Even if the government’s sole aim is to restore the legal status quo that existed before 2020, there are still a great many laws that would need to be amended… and we don’t know whether the government’s working on that.”

These include laws that prevent legal recognition for transgender people and adoption for same-sex couples.

Human Rights Watch pointed out earlier that “other discriminatory provisions” in Hungarian law were left intact.

The bill did not “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,” it added.

AFP