Extract from article by Benjamin Fox, published on Euractiv on 07/04/2023 – accessible here.
Fifteen EU governments have joined the European Commission’s lawsuit against Hungary over a controversial anti-LGBTQ law making what civil society groups have described as the largest human rights case in EU legal history.
Officials from the French and German governments and Slovenia confirmed on Thursday (6 April) that they had joined the suit ahead of a midnight deadline.
The legal dispute over the child protection bill, introduced in 2021, is the latest front in the EU’s long-running rule of law dispute with the Hungarian government and the culture wars.
The original objective of the bill was to make the prevention, detection, and punishment of sexual criminal offences against minors more effective. However, late amendments in the Hungarian parliament introduced a ban on minors’ access to any content that “propagates or portrays divergence from self-identity corresponding to sex at birth, sex change or homosexuality”.