Hungarian lawmakers on Oct. 13 by a 139-51 vote margin approved a bill that would remove anti-LGBTQ provisions from a 2021 “child protection” law the country’s former prime minister championed.
“It shall be forbidden to make accessible to persons who have not attained the age of 18 years advertisement that depicts sexuality in a gratuitous manner or that propagates or portrays divergence from self-identity corresponding to sex at birth, sex change or homosexuality,” reads Act LXXIX of 2021 that MPs approved in 2021.
The European Commission in 2022 challenged the law. Sixteen EU countries eventually joined the lawsuit against it.
Then-Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government defended the law. The EU’s top court, the EU Court of Justice, earlier this year struck it down. The BBC reported the EU after Tuesday’s vote released €4.2 billion ($4.67 billion) in funds it froze while Orbán’s government was in office.
“We are very happy that this got adopted,” Tamás Dombos of the Háttér Society, a Hungarian LGBTQ rights group, told the BBC. “We’ve been fighting this so-called child protection law for five years. There have been problems with the bill submitted to parliament, but most of those problems have been fixed.”
Péter Magyar became the country’s prime minister in May after his center-right Tisza party defeated Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP coalition in elections that took place on April 12.
The new Hungarian government in June allowed the annual Budapest Pride march to take place in the country’s capital without restrictions — MPs in 2025 passed a bill that banned Pride events, and amended the Hungarian constitution to prohibit public LGBTQ events.
Magyar last month announced his government would amend a law that essentially bans same-sex couples from adopting children.
The National LGBT Media Association represents 13 legacy publications in major markets across the country with a collective readership of more than 400K in print and more than 1 million + online. Learn more here: NationalLGBTMediaAssociation.com.
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