BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — The advocate general for the European Union’s highest court on Thursday urged the court to rule that Hungary violated the bloc’s laws and fundamental values when it passed legislation barring the availability of LGBTQ+ content to minors under 18.
The non-binding opinion from the European Court of Justice’s Advocate General, Tamara Capeta, states that the legislative changes adopted by Hungary’s right-wing populist government violate several rights protected by the EU, “namely the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of sex and sexual orientation, the respect for private and family life, the freedom of expression and information, as well as the right to human dignity.”
Hungary’s law, adopted in 2021 by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party, prohibited the display of content to minors that depicts homosexuality or gender change, while also providing harsher penalties for crimes of pedophilia.
The government has argued its policies, including a more recent law and constitutional amendment that effectively ban the popular Budapest Pride event, seek to protect children from what it calls “sexual propaganda.”
But critics of the legislation have compared it to Russia’s gay propaganda law of 2013, and say it conflates homosexuality with pedophilia as part of a campaign ploy to mobilize Fidesz’s conservative voter base.
In her opinion, Capeta rejected Hungary’s justification that the measures are aimed at protecting children, since the legislation “prohibits portrayal of ordinary lives of LGBTI people, and is not limited to shielding minors from pornographic content, which was prohibited by the law in Hungary already.”
She also wrote that Hungary has not offered any proof that content which portrays the ordinary lives of LGBTQ+ people has a negative effect on the healthy development of minors.
“Consequently, those amendments are based on a value judgment that homosexual and non-cisgender life is not of equal value or status” to heterosexual life, Capeta wrote.
She urged the EU court to rule in favor of the bloc’s executive commission — which launched an infringement procedure against Hungary over the law shortly after it was passed — on all counts.
Opinions by advocates general are often but not always followed by the European Court of Justice, which will make a final ruling on the case at a later date.
