10/11/2008
The Hungarian Parliament has adopted today two new pieces of legislation concerning LGBT people. The first one extends hate crime legislation to cover hate motivated crimes committed against a member of a group other than national, ethnic, or religious: from now on the Criminal Code contains a general formulation 'Violent act against a member of a social group', which is believed to include groups based on sexual orientation as well. The second piece of legislation makes it possible to initiate civil proceedings against a person who engages in degrading or intimidating behavior towards groups based on nationality, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.
Following the violent attacks at Gay Pride Marches in the past two years, and several other violent demonstrations by the same extreme right wing groups, the Hungarian Government prepared a bill on the protection of public order. The bill contains various amendments to the Criminal Code relating to public demonstrations. Upon the lobbying efforts of various LGBT and human rights organizations the bill also contains a rewording of the offense 'Violent act against a member of a national, ethnic or religious group'. The new formulation renames the offense 'Violent act against a member of a social group', retains the specific mentioning of national, ethnic and religious groups, but opens up the groups covered by the legislation by adding the general category 'other social group'. The new wording is believed to be applicable to sexual minorities, although government officials shied away from mentioning LGBT people in the explanation of the bill or the parliamentary debate. The bill was passed 210-162-6, the governing Hungarian Socialist Party and its former junior coalition partner Alliance of Free Democrats voted for the law, the the moderate conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum abstained, while the other right wing opposition parties voted against it.
As part of the same package the Government also prepared new legislation on hate speech. Currently, the Criminal Code contains the offense 'Incitement to hatred' which covers national, ethnic and religious groups, as well as the general category of 'other social groups', but the courts tend to interpret this offense very restrictively to cases where such behavior directly leads to violence.
The new legislation which is believed to conform to the standards set by the Constitutional Court offers a civil law solution to hate speech: members of a group subjected to degrading or intimidating behavior can initiate civil proceedings against the offender. The law also contains specific provisions to combine claims by different individuals related to the same offense. The law explicitly mentions groups based on nationality, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation as groups protected by the legislation.
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