Reforms to Hungary's Anti-LBGT Laws Welcome, but More to Do

The useful part

Click to expand Image People attend the Budapest Pride March in Budapest, Hungary, June 27, 2026. © 2026 Marton Monus/Reuters 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 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.

How it works

• However the government's plans leave other discriminatory provisions in Hungarian law intact.
• 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.

Details worth keeping

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. Nor does bill address discriminatory language in th...