Orban vs ECJ on 'promoting homosexuality ban' law

This month Europe has a chance to halt the wave of homophobic violence and authoritarianism that Victor Orban set rolling across our continent — with Vladimir Putin’s blessing — when he passed a “propaganda law” in June 2021. 

The next year was the most violent in a decade for LGBTQI+ people in Europe, and similarly repressive laws - nominally aimed at protecting children from “gay propaganda” in schools — have been implemented or fought over in several  EU countries including, Lithuania, Bulgaria,  Italy, Poland,  Romania and, Slovakia, as well as in candidate countries like Georgia.

The consequences have been dire.

The percentage of LGBTQI+ students reporting being bullied has jumped by almost a quarter to 67% in just four years and watchdogs warn of an emerging 'anti-children movement'—a reactionary network made up of the same groups that oppose sexual and reproductive rights, and LGBTQI+ equality. 

On Tuesday (19 November), judges at the European Court of Justice can turn this tide and redefine LGBTQI+ rights when they consider whether Hungary’s “ban on the promotion of homosexuality” breaches EU law.

They will not just be ruling on one law. This is a battle over the future of what can be taught, spoken, and accepted across the entire continent.

Hungary was the first EU country to import the legal model for stigmatising and terrorising LGBTQI+ people, that Putin put on Russia’s statute books in 2013.

Hungary’s "Act on Stricter Actions Against Paedophile Offenders" disgustingly links LGBTIQ+ people to paedophiles and de facto prohibits the sharing of information about LGBTQI people with under-18s in advertising, media, schools, bookshops, and even in conversations between parents and their children! 

Consequently, bookstores have been fined for selling teenage LGBTQI+ literature, LGBTQI+ school professionals face workplace harassment, TV coverage of Pride marches has been censored, 72 percent of same-sex partners report always, or often, avoiding holding hands in public, and 62 percent say that violence against them has increased. 

Orban’s attempt to force the country’s LGBTQI+ community back into the closet is causing real-world misery, particularly for the most vulnerable section of the community, who his law is supposed to protect: children.  

One young student told an illuminating study how, when students found out he was gay, in fifth-grade, “they beat me up, threw objects at me, and so on. I began sixth-grade at another school, but I was also beaten up while I was on my way home. It was reported to the police. I had to go to yet another school, but the boy who had attacked me kept threatening me. I tried to commit suicide several times.”

In 2024, this state of affairs is intolerable, all the more as Europe’s would-be autocrats are sharpening their pencils to spread Orban’s hate legislation further across the continent. Our judges now have an opportunity to show that this will not be tolerated.  

All 27 judges in court

Sensing the stakes, the court president has extraordinarily assigned the case to the full court — bringing all its 27 judges to weigh in — in a measure utilised in just 0.12% of cases.

The outcome of this action won’t just determine the fate of Hungary’s law; it will define how far Europe is willing to go to defend its founding principles of dignity, equality and the rule of law. 

The court must make a ground-breaking decision on how to interpret fundamental questions about Article 2 of the cornerstone Treaty of the EU, which enshrines the values of democracy, human rights and non-discrimination. If they find that Hungary has violated EU law it could set a binding precedent for revoking similar laws across the EU, in a major victory for LGBTIQ+ and child rights activists.

If Orbán chose to defy the court’s ruling Hungary could be fined of up to €1m per day which, along with lump-sum sanctions running into the hundreds of millions, are the norm in cases of “unprecedented and exceptionally serious breaches of EU law” like this one. 

Judgment in what is now the largest human rights court battle in the EU’s history will likely not arrive before summer 2025.

In the interim, EU institutions must maintain the momentum to collectively dismantle all anti-LGBTQI policies, including those passed with the support of mainstream political groups, such as in Bulgaria. This battle isn’t about dismantling one law but defending the values at the heart of the European project.

Russia has been strategically using this issue to carry out disinformation campaigns aimed at polarising and destabilising EU states and the bloc as a whole. In turn, Hungary’s state-funded think tanks have – through their connections with the US Heritage Foundation – claimed credit for far-right policy wins such as Florida governor Ron De Santis’s law banning the promotion of “gender ideology” in schools.  Protecting the rights of LGBTIQ+ people and children is now the frontline battle in an identity war that Europe may not have wanted but has certainly got. 

As Orbán builds ever-broader and deeper ties with Donald Trump through the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conferences — which Budapest has hosted since 2022 — we must stand shoulder to shoulder against his corrosive politics of division.  

This unified front must be a powerful warning to those flirting with similar anti-LGBTQI propaganda laws. Europe will not look the other way while authoritarian regimes manipulate fear and scapegoat vulnerable communities. Putin’s playbook of hatred and division cannot, and will not, find a home in a Europe founded on dignity, equality, and the rule of law.