According to today’s ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Hungarian government violated EU law by adopting the 2021 the homophobic and transphobic law of propaganda. The Court found that the law infringed upon the EU’s fundamental values, several fundamental rights enshrined in the Charter, and internal market rules (with particular regard to the freedom to provide services).
Today’s decision is historic in two respects: on the one hand, it confirms that the Orbán government’s policy of exclusion and stigmatization has no place in the EU, and second, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has taken a significant step toward becoming not only the guardian of the economic union but also of our shared fundamental values by, for the first time, finding a violation of the common values enshrined in the Treaty on European Union.
The court’s ruling means that homophobic and transphobic censorship in public spaces and the covering of books in bookstores must come to an end, and based on today’s decision, the arbitrary “Pride ban” adopted in 2025 cannot remain in effect.
The court’s reasoning
The law, modelled on Russian legislation, introduced systematic discrimination against sexual and gender minorities by prohibiting minors under the age of 18 from accessing content that “promotes or depicts a deviation from the gender identity corresponding to one’s biological sex, a change of sex, or homosexuality.”
In 2025, the government extended this broad restriction to the right to peaceful assembly in order to create a legal basis for banning Pride parades and other demonstrations advocating for the equal rights of LGBTQI people, criminalizing organizers, and fining participants. In these cases, Amnesty International Hungary, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the Háttér Society, and the Society for Civil Rights have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.
The CJEU ruled today that a Member State may not invoke its national constitutional identity as a justification for discriminatory legislation that violates the fundamental values of the Union. Upon joining the EU, every Member State undertakes to respect the values set out in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, namely human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. The Union’s common values constitute “red lines” whose violation requires a response in order to protect the Union’s constitutional model. For the first time, the CJEU has found a separate violation of Article 2 TEU, which defines the common values underlying the Union and shared by all Member States.
In 2021, the government justified the adoption of the legislation by arguing that it served to protect children and parents, since minors’ exposure to “LGBTQI content” could adversely affect their development. The CJEU, however, fundamentally rejected this, finding that the regulation does not target content that is harmful to children, and the government was unable to substantiate this claim with any practical, scientifically proven facts. There was no need for a legislative amendment introducing a ban on “LGBTQI content” to protect children from overtly sexual content, as rules regarding their protection already existed prior to the law’s adoption.
The Court of Justice of the European Union also found that the government’s introduction of the propaganda law was based on the prejudice that the lives of members of sexual and gender minorities are not of equal value or status to those of heterosexual and cisgender people. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the stigmatizing and offensive nature of the propaganda law leads to the creation or reinforcement of the social “invisibility” of people belonging to sexual and gender minorities, which violates their dignity. This, in turn, is contrary to the very identity of the Union—as a common legal order prevailing in a pluralistic society.
Based on the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union, it is up to the new National Assembly to repeal the law that violates EU law. If it fails to do so, the Court may even order it to pay a fine.
Translated by Zsófia Ziaja
