BUDAPEST, Oct 13: Hungarian lawmakers on Tuesday voted to remove anti-LGBTQ provisions in a 2021 "child protection" law adopted under nationalist ex-leader Viktor Orban.
Parliament passed a bill to amend the law with 139 votes in favour and 51 votes against, marking the first significant reversal of Orban's curbs targeting the LGBTQ community since pro-EU Prime Minister Peter Magyar took power in May.
Instead of banning the "portrayal" or "promotion" of sexual and gender diversity in content accessible to children, the new law will simply seek to protect under-18s from material that can "seriously impair the child's physical, intellectual, emotional or moral development".
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 fact that restrictions on access to LGBTQ content are being removed is definitely an important and positive step forward," Tamas Dombos from the Hatter Society rights group told AFP.
Magyar said the changes would bring Hungary in line with European Union regulations after Orban's restrictions were found to be in breach of the bloc's values.
The prime minister 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.
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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.
The changes remove "homophobic and transphobic provisions" from the law in compliance with the ECJ's ruling, according to LGBTQ rights activist Dombos.
- 'Still a lot to do' -
"But there is still a lot to do," Dombos 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.