EU's Top Court Finds Hungary's 2021 Anti-LGBTI+ Law Breaches EU Rules and Values

The European Union’s top court ruled Tuesday that Hungary’s 2021 law restricting minors’ access to content depicting homosexuality or gender reassignment breaches EU law, in a judgment that also broke new legal ground by finding a separate violation of Article 2 of the EU treaty on the bloc’s foundational values. The Court of Justice of the European Union, sitting as the Full Court in Case C-769/22, Commission v Hungary (Values of the European Union), said Hungary “has acted in breach of EU law” by adopting the measure.

At issue was Hungary’s Law No. LXXIX of 2021, presented as child-protection legislation but drafted to bar or limit under-18s’ access to content that “portrays or promotes deviation from the self-identity corresponding to the sex assigned at birth, gender reassignment, or homosexuality.” The restrictions applied across media and advertising, making the dispute one of the EU’s most consequential clashes over how member states can regulate content involving LGBTI+ people.

A central provision of the law states that “it is forbidden to make accessible to persons who have not attained the age of eighteen years content that is pornographic or that depicts sexuality in a gratuitous manner or that propagates or portrays divergence from self-identity corresponding to sex at birth, sex change or homosexuality.” The court said that framework does more than regulate content for children. In its view, the law “stigmatises and marginalises” non-cisgender and non-heterosexual people, while the law’s title itself associates them with people convicted of paedophilia. That stigmatization, the court said, increases the risk of hateful conduct and violates human dignity.

The judgment is significant not only because the court found the law incompatible with EU rules on the internal market and digital regulation, but because it explicitly tied the legislation to a breach of the Union’s core values. The court found violations of Article 56 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which protects the freedom to provide services, as well as provisions of the e-Commerce Directive, the Services Directive and the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. It also found breaches of multiple rights guaranteed by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, including Articles 1, 7, 11 and 21, and of the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Separately, and for the first time in an infringement action against a member state, the court found a breach of Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, which lists the bloc’s foundational values, including human dignity, equality and respect for human rights.

The court’s own press release captured the thrust of the ruling: “Values of the European Union: by adopting a law which stigmatises and marginalises LGBTI+ persons, Hungary has acted in breach of EU law.” The use of Article 2 TEU in this way marks an important institutional step, because the court treated the values provision not simply as political background but as a standalone legal basis for finding that a member state had infringed EU law.

Hungary must now comply with the judgment “without delay,” according to the court’s press materials. No financial penalty was imposed in Tuesday’s ruling. But if the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, later concludes that Hungary has failed to comply, it can return to court in a further case and seek financial penalties.

The law was promulgated on June 23, 2021, and generally entered into force on July 8, 2021. The European Commission filed its case on Dec. 19, 2022, arguing that the measure unlawfully restricted services, media content and fundamental rights protected under EU law. In June 2025, Advocate General Tamara Ćapeta had advised the court to find the law incompatible with EU law, though that opinion was not binding.