00:00To talk more about this, we can welcome to the program Kianan Russells, Senior Policy Officer at ILGA Europe.
00:08Welcome to the program. Thank you for joining us.
00:12Thank you for having me.
00:13So I was wondering, since after that report you sort of see a little background there,
00:18could you take us through how we ended up where we are today,
00:22with the mayor of Budapest defying the prime minister holding that march despite this government ban?
00:27Absolutely. To see the full story, we have to go back several years to 2021 when Budapest passed their Child Protection Act.
00:38That law banned, among other things, the display of LGBTI-related imagery and symbols in public spaces under the guise of, quote-unquote, protecting children.
00:51That law is under infringement proceedings with the European Union, has gone to the European Court of Justice,
00:58and the European Commission has a strong position that the law indeed violates EU law.
01:03Earlier this year, in March 2025, the Hungarian government passed a new law using the 2021 Child Protection Act as a legal basis to ban pride marches in the country.
01:17That law thus uses the same argument that pride in itself has the potential to harm children should they see pride-related activities.
01:30There's been a great deal of effort since then to get, by European Parliament, by European Union member states,
01:38to get the European Commission to act to, at the very least, block the ban while it goes through a legal evaluation by the Commission and potentially the European Court of Justice.
01:49But to date, the Commission has not taken that action.
01:54And as a result, the mayor of Budapest said that he would host the pride event as a municipal event.
02:01It's unclear, honestly, if having the event be a municipal event will have the kind of effect that the mayor hopes.
02:09As we just saw, Prime Minister Orban has made clear that he still considers the event to be unlawful and banned,
02:16even though it is classified as a municipal event.
02:19So the next few hours will tell us quite a great deal about the safety and security of the participants and the pride,
02:27as well as whether there is a clear violation of freedom of assembly within an EU member state.
02:34Yes, I understand that attendees could potentially be risking fines of up to 500 euros.
02:42The police can use facial recognition technology to identify them.
02:47Organizers could face a one-year prison sentence.
02:49So this is some serious stuff here.
02:51But this showdown, could it have been avoided?
02:57It could.
02:58One of the things that we've been calling for since March when the 2025 law was passed was for the European Commission to call for interim measures.
03:08Interim measures essentially puts an injunction on a law while legal proceedings are allowed to continue,
03:14which would have kept the Hungarian government from implementing the new 2025 law until it could be evaluated in terms of its legality in the European Union legal framework.
03:24Had those interim measures been requested at any point in the last three months,
03:29I think we would not be in the situation that we're in today.
03:32Unfortunately, everyone who's attending the pride today is at risk of legal consequences.
03:37And you also point out the use of facial recognition,
03:40which in itself potentially violates a different European Union law, the AI Act,
03:44which has quite strict regulations around in what ways AI can be used to identify people.
03:51And in a public gathering like this is explicitly prohibited under the AI Act.
03:57So there's there's several angles that the commission could have taken to temporarily block while legal analysis was ongoing.
04:06Now, at the moment, our focus here is on Hungary because of the pride parade that's going on right now.
04:12But are we seeing a rollback of the rights of the LGBTQ communities in Europe?
04:18We're certainly seeing a challenge.
04:23And that challenge has manifested itself in attacks on pride beyond Hungary as well,
04:29in Turkey, in the UK, where there are efforts to limit or completely block the freedom of assembly.
04:38We've also seen a rather severe attack on the human rights of trans people.
04:44And that's taking place across the region from Slovakia to potential challenges in Romania,
04:50in Bulgaria, as well as in the UK with the recent UK Supreme Court ruling
04:54and the interpretation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the UK.
04:58All of these things, from our perspective, are a bit of a smokescreen.
05:02LGBTI people are, in this moment in history, an easy scapegoat for those wishing not only to attack
05:12the human rights framework, but to attack democracy itself, to distract the general public from those attacks
05:19on democracy and create a villain that's easily targeted and marginalized.
05:26LGBTI people make up only 5 to 10 percent of populations.
05:29Trans people, more like half a percent of the population.
05:33And so it's quite easy to vilify this group with which many people have no contact.
05:38And in doing so, hide anti-democratic efforts, as we're seeing in Slovakia with the potential constitutional reform,
05:45which on its surface is being presented to the public as about protecting sort of traditional concepts of gender and gender roles.
05:54But within that is a clause on national sovereignty, which would essentially exempt Slovakia from EU law,
06:01which is an anti-democratic effort.
06:03That part isn't being discussed in the public sphere.
06:06It's only the LGBTI part, because that's salacious or more interesting to the general public.
06:13But what we see is these anti-democratic efforts and anti-LGBTI efforts go hand in hand.
06:17So we were mentioning a little bit earlier about if the European Commission had stepped in a little sooner,
06:25maybe the showdown wouldn't be happening the way it's happening currently.
06:30Do you feel the European Commission is doing enough to protect the rights of the community?
06:35And what else or what more could they be doing?
06:40Unfortunately, we don't.
06:42To this day, we've gotten a lot of strong words about how love is love.
06:49You have the right to love whom you want.
06:51You have the right to be who you are.
06:53But the European Commission is not using all the tools in its toolbox to ensure that those rights that they purport are being protected.
07:03The main tool that we would have liked to see the Commission use before today is calling for interim measures to block the implementation of this ban in Hungary
07:14before a full legal analysis could be done.
07:18That was something that was relatively straightforward to do, and the Commission refused.
07:22So unfortunately, no, we don't feel that the European Commission is using every tool in their toolbox.
07:26Thank you so much, Kianan, for joining us today.
07:30That's France, excuse me, that's Kianan Russell, Senior Policy Officer at ILGA Europe.
