In a landmark judgment, the Court of Justice sitting in its most solemn formation finds Hungary violated human dignity, freedom of expression, and Article 2 TEU itself by passing a law that deliberately links LGBTQ+ people to paedophilia.
The Court of Justice of the European Union, sitting as a Full Court, the formation reserved for cases of exceptional constitutional significance, delivered its judgment in Commission v Hungary, Case C-769/22, on 21 April 2026. Hungary lost on every single one of the six pleas brought by the European Commission. The ruling is historic for a reason that goes beyond any one piece of legislation, as for the first time in the history of EU infringement proceedings, a Member State has been found in breach of Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, the provision that lists the founding values of the Union itself. The Court confirmed what academic lawyers had long debated but courts had never settled, that those values are legally binding, directly justiciable, and enforceable against Member States through a standard infringement action before the Court.
The law at the centre of the case is Act LXXIX of 2021, adopted by the Hungarian National Assembly on 15 June 2021 on a vote of 157 to 1, with most opposition parties boycotting the chamber in protest. The law’s full title, “Law laying down stricter measures in respect of persons convicted of paedophilia and amending certain laws adopted in the interests of the protection of children,” conceals what the Commission and ultimately the Court described as its true operative effect. Hidden within amendments to five separate Hungarian laws was a coordinated package of restrictions targeting any content that portrays or promotes homosexuality, gender reassignment, or deviation from the sex assigned at birth, whenever that content might reach a person under 18. Media providers, advertisers, bookshops, publishers, and schools all fell within its reach.
The Court’s central legal finding on the audiovisual media provisions is quite blunt, as Paragraph 9(6) of the Law on Media Services, which required broadcasters to classify any programme with homosexuality or non-cisgender content as Category V, restricting it to the 22:00 to 05:00 slot, constitutes direct discrimination based on sex and sexual orientation under Article 21(1) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The same content when depicting cisgender heterosexual persons faces no such restriction. The Court found that this difference in treatment does not merely limit a fundamental right, but that it undermines the very essence of the non-discrimination guarantee. Under settled EU constitutional law, a measure that undermines the essence of a Charter right cannot be justified under any circumstances, not by child protection, not by parental rights, and not by the margin of appreciation Member States enjoy when implementing EU media legislation. There is no proportionality test to pass when the essence of a right has been destroyed.
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The same logic disabled every justification Hungary attempted to deploy, with the Court acknowledging that protecting minors from age-inappropriate content is a legitimate and important objective, and that Member States retain genuine discretion to define what harms the physical, mental and moral development of children. What they cannot do, the Court held, is base that definition on the identity or sexual orientation of the persons depicted rather than on the nature of the content itself. Classifying any portrayal of homosexuality as presumptively harmful, regardless of its context, explicitness, or audience, does not regulate harmful content. It discriminates against a category of people by treating their existence as the source of harm. The Court found this incompatible with Article 21(1) of the Charter, with the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, with the e-Commerce Directive’s country-of-origin principle, with the Services Directive’s rules on cross-border service provision, and, as a cumulative consequence of all of the above, with Article 2 TEU itself.
The Article 2 TEU finding requires careful reading. The Court set a demanding threshold, stating that not every infringement of a provision that gives concrete expression to EU values amounts to a freestanding breach of Article 2. Only a manifest and particularly serious breach, incompatible with the very identity of the Union as a common legal order, clears that bar. The Court found that Hungary’s law crosses it, basing this conclussion on three different factors:
- First, the law associates non-cisgender and non-heterosexual persons with persons convicted of paedophilia, directly through the law’s own title, establishing a legal link between a minority’s identity and the most serious category of child sexual exploitation.
- Second, the law is not a single provision but a coordinated legislative strategy implemented across five separate statutes, reflecting a deliberate and coherent policy rather than an inadvertent overreach.
- Third, the cumulative effect is the social invisibility of a group that forms part of Hungarian and European society, imposed by a Member State as a matter of binding law.
This combination undermines the values of human dignity, equality, and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities, which Article 2 TEU declares to be the foundation of the Union. Hungary cannot invoke its national identity under Article 4(2) TEU to exempt itself, because Article 4(2) must be read in light of Article 2 and can only protect national identities that are themselves consistent with those founding values.
The law’s real-world impact before the ruling
The judgment arrives after nearly five years during which the law produced exactly the effects its critics predicted at passage. Amnesty International’s February 2024 report documented what it called a “cloud of fear” that had settled across the LGBTQ+ community in Hungary and across every sector that might be touched by the restrictions. RTL Klub, Hungary’s largest commercial broadcaster, refused to air public service advertisements for the Budapest Pride festival on the ground that doing so would violate the law. Lira, Hungary’s second-largest bookstore chain, was fined 12 million forints, approximately 30,000 euros, in July 2023 for selling Alice Oseman’s graphic novel “Heartstopper,” aimed at young adult readers, without wrapping it in opaque plastic foil and placing it in an over-18 section. Authors reported receiving threats they had never experienced before the law passed. Writer Dóra Papp described fear being planted in her after years of public book signings. Publishers spoke of manuscripts they had halted or could not publish in Hungary. Schools effectively avoided any discussion touching LGBTQ+ topics, including in health and sex education, even where such discussions would have been age-appropriate and evidence-based.
The law extended well beyond media and books, as Paragraph 9(12) of the Law on Public Education banned any school activity from having the aim of promoting deviation from birth-assigned sex identity, gender reassignment, or homosexuality in the context of sexual culture, sexual life, sexual orientation, and sexual development. The Court found that this covered not only in-house teaching but also external service providers who offer educational content to schools, and that it constituted a restriction on the cross-border freedom to provide services incompatible with the Services Directive.
A case built on unprecedented coalition
When the Commission filed the infringement action on 19 December 2022, it had already built what would become the largest human rights coalition in the history of EU infringement proceedings. Seventeen Member States applied to intervene in support of the Commission: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, Finland, Sweden, and the European Parliament. Hungary faced not the Commission alone but an alignment of nearly two thirds of the Member State governments, the directly elected legislature of the Union, and the weight of the EU’s entire legal architecture.
The oral hearing took place on 19 November 2024. Advocate General Tamara Ćapeta delivered her Opinion on 5 June 2025, proposing that the Court find Hungary in violation of EU law on every ground and adding that Hungary had “significantly deviated from the model of a constitutional democracy” reflected in Article 2 TEU. The Full Court, composed of all 25 judges under President Koen Lenaerts, followed the Advocate General’s analysis in all material respects and went to judgment on 21 April 2026.
The constitutional significance of the Article 2 TEU ruling
The finding on Article 2 TEU is the most consequential precedent in the judgment, and its implications extend far beyond Hungary. Academic literature since 2022 had been divided on whether Article 2 TEU could serve as a freestanding ground for infringement action. Hungary and several other Member States had argued that the procedure in Article 7 TEU, which requires a four-fifths majority in the Council to determine a clear risk of serious breach and unanimity in the European Council to find a breach, is the exclusive mechanism for enforcing EU values as such. The Full Court rejected that position. It held that Article 7 TEU and infringement proceedings under Article 258 TFEU coexist and serve different functions. Article 7 enables the suspension of membership rights, a political sanction requiring supranational political consensus. Article 258 infringement proceedings enable the Court to make a binding declaration of failure to fulfil obligations, a legal sanction available on the Commission’s initiative. Neither mechanism displaces the other. The values listed in Article 2 are binding law, and the Court has general jurisdiction under the first subparagraph of Article 19(1) TEU to ensure that in the interpretation and application of the Treaties the law is observed. No derogation from that general jurisdiction exists, and none can be implied.
The threshold the Court set for an Article 2 TEU breach, manifest and particularly serious, incompatible with the Union’s identity as a common legal order in a pluralist society, does meaningfully limit the reach of the precedent. Not every Charter violation will simultaneously constitute an Article 2 TEU breach, but the Court has now established that the threshold can be met and what it looks like when it is. A coordinated legislative policy that systematically stigmatises a minority, associates their identity with criminality, and aims at their effective erasure from the public sphere clears it.
Hungary’s political situation: the timing is striking
The ruling arrives nine days after a Hungarian national election that ended Viktor Orbán’s 16-year hold on power. Péter Magyar’s centre-right Tisza party won a landslide victory on 12 April 2026, securing 138 seats in the 199-seat National Assembly on 53.6 percent of the vote, giving him a two-thirds constitutional supermajority. Orbán’s Fidesz took just 55 seats on 37.8 percent. Magyar has campaigned primarily on anti-corruption and pro-EU integration, pledging to restore judicial independence and dismantle the architecture of Orbán-era state capture.
The compliance question that now confronts Magyar’s incoming government is legally straightforward but politically sensitive. Under EU law, a Member State must comply with a judgment declaring a failure to fulfil obligations without delay. If the Commission considers compliance inadequate, it may bring a second action under Article 260 TFEU seeking lump-sum or periodic financial penalties. Magyar’s campaign deliberately avoided explicit commitments on LGBTQ+ rights, repeatedly describing questions about the anti-LGBTQ+ law as Viktor Orbán’s “propaganda rubber bone”, a distraction from economic issues. He signalled opposition to the Pride ban introduced in 2025 but stopped short of promising repeal of the broader 2021 law. The ECJ ruling changes the political calculus sharply, as non-compliance is no longer a political choice with uncertain consequences. It would now be a confirmed breach of EU law carrying a clear financial enforcement path. Human Rights Watch, in its statement of 14 April 2026 calling on the new Hungarian government to restore the rule of law, specifically listed repeal of the 2021 propaganda law among the first steps a credible reform agenda would require. ILGA-Europe framed the judgment as a direct test of whether Magyar’s pro-EU commitments will translate into concrete legislative action.
What compliance actually requires
The judgment is declaratory in nature, as the Court does not itself repeal Hungarian law, nor can it do so. What Hungary must now do, without delay and under the threat of Article 260 TFEU proceedings if it does not, is bring each of the condemned provisions into conformity with EU law. At minimum, that requires repealing or fundamentally restructuring the restrictions on media content classification, the advertising prohibition, the restrictions on educational services, the excess powers conferred on the Media Council to police cross-border audiovisual services from other Member States, and the overly broad provision giving access to criminal records of sex offenders. For each of those measures, the Court found not just disproportionality but, in most cases, discrimination at the level of essence rather than limitation, meaning that tighter proportionality review or procedural reform will not rescue the provisions. They must go.
The GDPR violation, covering the criminal records access provision, provides perhaps the clearest near-term legislative fix, as it would require tightening the definition of who qualifies as an authorised person to access the relevant data and introducing meaningful objective-criteria controls rather than relying on self-declaration by the person requesting access. The media law violations are more structurally embedded and will require amending the Law on Media Services, the Law on Commercial Advertising, and the Law on the Protection of Children in ways that remove the discriminatory targeting of sexual orientation and gender identity as classification criteria.
Whether that legislative agenda can survive the political environment in Hungary, where Orbán remains the leader of the opposition with a sizeable parliamentary presence and where the electorate that voted Fidesz out had limited appetite for an explicit culture-war rematch, remains to be seen. The clock under EU infringement law is already running.
