Extract from article by Chantelle Billson, published on Pink News on 22/04/2023 – accessible here.
Hungary’s president Katalin Novak has refused to accept an inhumane bill that would allow its citizens to anonymously report same-sex families with children to authorities.
The vetoed bill, proposed by Hungarian deputy prime minister Zsolt Semjén in February, would see same-sex families reprimanded for breaching the “constitutionally recognised role of marriage and the family”.
As it stands, Hungary’s constitution defines and protects the definition of marriage as an institution “between one man and one woman” while adding that “the mother is a woman, the father is a man”.
President Novak sent the bill back to parliament and stated in a letter on Friday (21 April), that it “cites the protection of constitutional values to introduce vaguely-worded directives whose practical applicability and legal consequences are doubtful,” BNN Bloomberg reported.
Suggesting that the proposed bill weakens – rather than strengthens – constitutional protections, Novak explained that she felt it also contained passages that are irrelevant to the original purpose of “facilitating the reporting of corruption in line with European Union law”.