Budapest, Hungary (AP) —Major human rights officials called on Hungarian lawmakers on Monday to reject legislation banning content that portrays or promotes homosexuality or sex reassignment to persons under the age of 18.
The appeal was filed in Budapest after a protest was planned against a bill backed by Prime Minister Victor Oban’s national government.
Oban’s conservative ruling party, Fides, submitted a bill last week and will vote on it on Tuesday. This includes measures aimed at combating pedophilia and other amendments prohibiting the transmission of information about LGBT people or same-sex relationships to young people.
Fides describes the law as an effort to protect children from pedophilia.
However, Lydia Gull, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that equating sexual and gender diversity with pedophilia risks damaging and endangering the dignity of LGBT people. Said there is.
Gull called the law “an ironic, unpleasant and deliberate attempt by the Oban government to trample the rights of LGBT people and make them essentially invisible in Hungarian society.”
Dunya Miyatovic, a Human Rights Commissioner of the Council of Europe, a major human rights group on the continent, has called on Hungarian lawmakers to dismiss the bill.
“We urge you to remain vigilant for such initiatives to limit human rights and promote measures to stigmatize some members of society,” Mijatovic said in a statement on Monday. Stated.
The Hungarian amendment prohibits the depiction or discussion of various gender identities and sexual orientations in public, including schools and the media.
Some human rights groups have compared the planned ban to the 2013 Discriminatory Russian Law, which bans the so-called Anti-Homosexuality Act, which is widely used as a means of discrimination.
Mijatovic said such legislation would increase prejudice against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. She also argued that international human rights groups have established that young people have the right to comprehensive sex education. This is not possible if discussions on LGBT issues are prohibited.
“The proposed legislative changes violate international and European human rights standards. It is misleading and false to claim that they are being introduced to protect children,” she said. ..
Given that Fides has a majority, the bill is expected to be passed.
Hungarian opponents are divided on this issue.
The right-wing Jobbik party has agreed on Monday that “promotion” and “sexual orientation of all kinds” of sex change should not be done, despite saying that there are some flaws. It is permitted by schools that have stated that they will vote for pedophilia bills and amendments.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Union on the left said it would boycott the entire session on Tuesday, not just voting for the anti-pedophilia bill, to protest Fides’ “hate” and “discriminatory politics.”
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