The Hungarian Parliament passed a tranche of laws on Tuesday that further consolidates power in the executive branch and effectively bans gay couples from adopting children.
Among the laws passed was a constitutional amendment, the ninth amendment since the constitution was ratified in 2011, that greatly reduces oversight on government spending and makes it easier for the prime minister to declare a state of emergency.
The Hungarian law reduces and generalizes the six constitutional types of special legal orders required to establish a state of emergency to just three, according to Daily News Hungary — a state of war, emergency, or danger.
Critics argue that the relaxed oversights on federal spending will “allow the government to use state money to benefit loyalists,” according to the New York Times.
Previously, Central European University’s Renata Uitz said, “you actually had to try and state a coup and forcefully change the constitutional order” to invoke a state of emergency. Now, even an “unruly demonstration” could be enough for the government to declare a state of emergency.
Another bill passed Tuesday nearly triples the number of candidates an opposition party needs to run in order to be included in a national election list, according to Daily News Hungary.
The constitutional amendment also defines “the concept of family at the constitutional level” to ensure “the undisturbed development of children,” according to Hungarian Secretary of State for International Communications Zoltan Kovacs.
The amendment stipulates that a family unit comprises a man as the father and a woman as the mother, effectively banning gay couples from adopting children. The law also “protects self-identity of the children’s sex by birth,” legal language meant to “further stigmatize the transgender and intersex people in Hungary,” according to British human rights group Amnesty International.
The bill makes Hungary “the first country in the European Union” to codify the legal definition of a family unit in its founding document. The law is designed to give “new generations the chance to learn about Hungarian identity and protect its sovereignty as well as the national role of Christianity,” according to an explanatory text.
The law was met with widespread criticism from the international community. Amnesty International called Tuesday a “dark day for LGBTI community” after the “homophobic discriminatory bill” was passed.
“This is a dark day for Hungary’s LGBTQ community and a dark day for human rights,” Amnesty Hungary Director David Vig said. “These discriminatory, homophobic, and transphobic new laws — rushed through under the cover of the coronavirus pandemic — are just the latest attack on LGBTQ people by Hungarian authorities.”
“LGBTI children will be forced to grow up in an environment which restricts them from being able to express their identities, and children across Hungary will be refused safe and loving families, as adoption is restricted only to married heterosexual couples,” International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association Advocacy Director Katrin Hugendubel added.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been criticized a number of times by the European Court of Justice, the highest court of the EU, for implementing policies that have gradually undermined the liberal democratic fibers of Hungary’s less than 10-year-old constitution.
The Hungarian government over the past decade has increasingly moved to cement what Orban calls an “illiberal democracy,” which critics have called an “electoral autocracy,” according to the New York Times. Orban’s government has consistently expanded the prime minister’s authority, packed the Constitutional Court with loyalists, and muzzled the country’s free press.
In 2018, hundreds of private news outlets in Hungary were simultaneously “donated” to a central holding company run by people close to Orban, largely recognized as a “broadside against pluralism under the increasingly autocratic Mr. Orban.”
