Hungary Promises to End the Adoption Ban. Human Rights Watch Lists What the Reform Still Leaves Standing.

Human Rights Watch published its assessment of Hungary’s repeal bill today, and the headline it chose — “Reforms to Hungary’s Anti-LGBT Laws Welcome, but More to Do” — is about as warm as HRW gets. The substance underneath it is a list, and the list is the useful part.

Hungary’s government tabled legislation on Monday to strip the “promotion of homosexuality” provisions out of the 2021 child protection law and its mirror amendments in media, advertising and education legislation, five months after the Court of Justice of the European Union found the law breached EU law and the Union’s founding values. Over the weekend, Prime Minister Péter Magyar went further at a press conference, saying his government would move to end the ban on same-sex couples adopting. “We can say unequivocally that we will change this system,” he told reporters, adding that such decisions “should not be a minister, a politician” but professionals assessing what allows a child to have a good life.

Two steps forward in four days, then. Here is what has not moved.

Section 5/A

HRW’s first finding is the kind of detail that decides whether a repeal is real. Lydia Gall, HRW’s senior Europe researcher, notes that while the bill removes the restrictions on “portrayal” and “promotion” of homosexuality and gender diversity from several statutes, it leaves section 5/A of the Family Protection Act untouched — and section 5/A contains substantially the same restrictions on content accessible to children.

In other words, the operative language survives in one of the laws the bill does not amend. Whether that is an oversight or a deliberate retention is not yet clear, and it is the single most fixable item on the list: it requires an amendment, not a constitutional majority, and it can be dealt with while the bill is still in parliament.

Article XVI

The second item is the constitution. HRW names Article XVI of the Fundamental Law specifically, as the provision that supplies the constitutional basis for anti-LGBT restrictions. The April 2025 fifteenth amendment gave constitutional standing to prohibitions on public LGBTQ+ events and wrote a two-sex definition into the text.

Amending the Fundamental Law requires a two-thirds majority in parliament. Here is the thing: Tisza has one. HRW is blunt about the implication — “The Tisza government has a parliamentary supermajority,” Gall writes, and so “the government needs to finish what it started.”

That single sentence removes the most convenient excuse available. When a government lacks the votes, incomplete reform is arithmetic. When it has the votes, incomplete reform is a choice.

The Freedom of Assembly Act

Third on the list are the restrictions in the Freedom of Assembly Act that were used to prohibit Pride marches and other LGBTQ+ gatherings. Police permitted this year’s marches — Budapest Pride went ahead on 27 June — and Hungarian prosecutors dropped Pride-related charges in June. But permission granted is not a law repealed. The enforcement framework, including the fines regime for participants and the provisions authorising facial recognition to identify attendees, has simply gone unused this season.

Domestic organisations have made the same point. The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, Háttér Society and Amnesty International Hungary issued a joint response welcoming the proposed changes while calling for further amendments to fully dismantle the discriminatory framework. Their framing, like HRW’s, is that this is not a tidy-up of the statute book but a structural job with constitutional reform at its centre.

Where adoption actually sits

Magyar’s weekend commitment is significant precisely because it is the first thing he has said about LGBTQ+ rights that was not framed as EU compliance. The repeal bill exists because the CJEU ruled in April; the adoption promise does not have a court order behind it.

It is worth being precise about what the ban is. In 2020 the Orbán government amended the constitution to define family as based on marriage between a man and a woman, and changed the adoption rules so that applications from single people required approval by the family affairs minister. Until then, one member of a same-sex couple could adopt as a single applicant. After it, that route ran through a political appointee, and in practice it closed.

Magyar’s framing — that professionals rather than ministers should make these decisions — points at that mechanism directly. Removing ministerial sign-off would restore the single-applicant route. It would not, on its own, create joint adoption rights for same-sex couples, because the constitutional definition of family and marriage remains in place. Which brings the adoption question back to Article XVI and the Fundamental Law, the same place every other item on this list ends up.

Notably, HRW’s dispatch does not raise adoption or legal gender recognition among its asks. Its focus is narrower and sharper: the surviving clause, the constitution, the assembly law. Legal gender recognition — abolished outright in May 2020, leaving trans Hungarians unable to correct the sex marker or name on official documents — sits outside this week’s reform entirely and would require both a statutory fix and constitutional room to make it stick.

A government doing this the least romantic way possible

It is worth naming what kind of political moment this is, because it is not a liberation narrative and reporting it as one sets people up for disappointment.

Magyar is a centre-right politician who was inside Fidesz until 2024 and campaigned in April on anti-corruption, the economy and repairing relations with Brussels. He deliberately refused to engage with LGBTQ+ questions during the campaign, dismissing them as Orbán’s “propaganda rubber bone” — a distraction thrown to the opposition. His government is dismantling the anti-LGBT legal machinery as part of a broader project of making Hungary a normal EU member state again, not because it ran on rainbow flags.

That has an upside and a downside. The upside is that reform driven by EU compliance and governing pragmatism is durable in a way that symbolic gestures are not; it survives the next news cycle. The downside is that it stops precisely where the compliance requirement stops, and the CJEU judgment did not require anything about the constitution, the assembly law or adoption.

Which is why HRW’s short list matters more than its headline. The court has done what it can do. Everything that remains is now purely a question of what a government with a two-thirds majority decides to spend it on — and the Hungarian organisations that spent five years litigating and marching under these laws are now, for the first time in a decade, in the position of asking a government that might actually answer.