Several civil society organizations have notified the Budapest Police Department, acting as the assembly authority, of their intention to hold a march on 1 June 2025 with the aim of “standing up for the equal rights of transgender people and the LGBTQI community and draw attention to the effects of exclusionist legislation over the past five years, particularly in view of the upcoming 30th Budapest Pride parade and the Government’s incitement of hatred against the LGBTQ community”. The organizers have undertaken that “the assembly will not make available any pornographic content or content depicting sexuality in any way, but will exclusively promote and present the protection of the fundamental rights and equality before the law of members of the LGBTQI community”.
The assembly authority – which noted and secured similar events scheduled for 17 May 2025 – prohibited the assembly from being held at the location and time specified in the notification, as it found that the assembly violated the Fifteenth Amendment to the Fundamental Law and related legislation, as it infringed the fundamental right of children to the protection and care necessary for their proper physical, mental and moral development.
The applicants challenged the authority’s decision before the Curia. According to their legal action, the decision of the assembly authority was based on incomplete and insufficiently established facts, the authority failed to comply with its obligation to provide reasoning, and erroneously asserted a conflict between the fundamental right to peaceful assembly and the fundamental right to child protection, thereby leading to an unlawful restriction of a fundamental right. They also requested that the Curia make a reference for a preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union.
In this case, the Curia had to apply for the first time the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Fundamental Law, effective from 15 April 2025, as well as the related legislation. As a result of interpreting these provisions, the Curia found that the fundamental right of children to protection can only be compared to the right to life and the rights of children take precedence over all other rights. Consequently, in order to protect the fundamental right of the child, any other right, with the exception of the right to life, including the fundamental right to peaceful assembly, may be restricted to any extent, even if this results in the latter being deprived of its substance under certain circumstances. Any endeavor that conflicts with Article XVI, paragraph (1) of the Fundamental Law, including the intention to assemble peacefully, falls outside the scope of protection of the Fundamental Law. In this case, therefore, the legal consequences cannot be weighed, and competing fundamental rights cannot be compared. However, even in such cases, the assembly authority must examine the factual circumstances of the planned assembly, and its decision may be based only on conclusions based on facts. In the absence of the foregoing, the application of legal consequences is unfounded.
The decision of the assembly authority does not contain any assessable facts other than the wording of the notification, the location of the march and assembly, and the statement that anyone, including children, may join the assembly. The decision did not explain why the cited provisions of the Fundamental Law and the related legislation apply to the assembly specified in the notification. Based on the decision and the documents of the proceedings, it was also not possible to determine what specific circumstances led the assembly authority to ban the assembly, while two weeks earlier it had not considered assemblies on similar topics to be in violation of the Fundamental Law, but had noted them.
The Curia could not establish the facts of the case in place of the assembly authority, nor could it gather the missing pieces of evidence, and in the absence of the foregoing, it was not possible to take a position on the legality of the ban on the assembly. Therefore, the Curia annulled the decision and obliged the assembly authority to conduct new proceedings and issue a new decision, drawing its attention to the planned date of the assembly specified in the notification. The Curia did not find it necessary to refer the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union in view of the circumstances of the case.
The full text of the Hungarian-language version of the decision is available on the website of Curia (https://kuria-birosag.hu/hu/gyulekezesi-jogorvoslati-ugyek).
Budapest, 31 May 2025
Press and Protocol Unit of the Curia of Hungary