Two Months After Shipova: Bulgaria, Hungary, and Slovakia Still Don't Have a Working Trans Recognition Process

Sixty days ago, on March 11, the Court of Justice of the European Union handed down its ruling in K.M.H. v. Sofia City Municipality — known publicly under the pseudonym Shipova — and gave three EU member states an unmistakable deadline: provide a working legal gender recognition process for citizens who have exercised free movement, or face Article 258 infringement proceedings from the European Commission.

Today, May 10, the picture across Bulgaria, Hungary, and Slovakia is clearer than it was in March. Bulgaria has begun reopening individual cases. Hungary has done effectively nothing. Slovakia has signaled outright noncompliance. The story of the next twelve months will be how the Commission handles three different flavors of resistance to the same ruling.

What the court actually said

The Shipova case was brought by a Bulgarian trans woman who has lived in Italy for years and could not obtain a change to her name, gender marker, or personal identification number on her Bulgarian documents. Bulgaria’s Supreme Court of Cassation referred the case to Luxembourg in 2024.

The CJEU’s ruling was narrower than activist groups had asked for, but harder for member states to evade. The court held that Article 21 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union — which guarantees free movement and residence — is inevitably hindered when a national of one member state cannot have their gender legally recognized in the country of citizenship after transitioning while residing in another member state. The Charter of Fundamental Rights and the right to private and family life under Article 7 reinforce that conclusion. Member states do not get to point to constitutional or supreme court rulings of their own to escape this obligation. Domestic apex courts cannot be held to bind national lower courts on this question, because EU law overrides them.

What the court did not say is also important. The CJEU did not require member states to offer self-declaration, the most progressive form of legal gender recognition. It did not require any specific procedure. It only required that some functional process exist, and that it apply at minimum to citizens who have exercised free movement. The narrower scope is precisely what makes the ruling difficult for noncompliant states to dismiss as overreach.

Bulgaria: cases reopened, no law passed

Bulgaria has done the most of the three governments — which is not saying much. Within ten days of the ruling, the Sofia administrative courts had reopened the dozens of cases that had been stayed pending the CJEU’s decision. Several of those cases have since received favorable judgments, with the courts issuing orders requiring municipal civil status registers to update gender markers for plaintiffs who had exercised free movement.

But Bulgaria still has no general legal gender recognition statute. The 2018 Constitutional Court decision that effectively blocked legal gender recognition remains on the books, and the parliament has not introduced legislation to replace it. The compromise position the Bulgarian government has settled on — case-by-case judicial orders for free-movement claimants only — leaves Bulgarian trans citizens who have not lived abroad without any pathway. Bulgarian LGBT advocacy groups, including Bilitis and the Single Step Foundation, have pointed out that the Shipova ruling does not require this two-tier outcome; it sets a floor, not a ceiling. The European Commission has been clear in private communications, according to two diplomatic sources we have spoken with, that piecemeal compliance is not enough.

Bulgarian civil society organizations have asked the Commission to open infringement proceedings if the Borissov government has not introduced a general LGR bill by autumn. Whether the Commission will move that quickly is uncertain.

Hungary: rhetorical defiance, administrative inertia

Hungary’s situation is the most legally tangled. Hungary’s parliament passed a constitutional amendment in 2020 forbidding any change of birth-assigned sex in civil records, and a separate 2021 statute prohibits any administrative process for legal gender recognition. The new Magyar government, which took office in mid-May after the April 12 election, has so far made no statements about how it intends to comply with the Shipova ruling. The outgoing Orbán cabinet’s last public position, in early March, was that the CJEU “exceeded its competence.”

What may shift the Hungarian situation is the Magyar government’s broader posture toward the European Court of Justice. Magyar’s Tisza party campaigned on returning Hungary to mainstream EU compliance and unblocking the frozen cohesion funds. A repeal of the 2020 constitutional amendment is politically extremely difficult and would require a two-thirds majority that the new government does not have on its own. But narrower administrative compliance — at minimum, a process for free-movement claimants, as Bulgaria has improvised — is plausibly within reach.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the country’s leading rights-litigation organization, has already begun preparing test cases. The first is expected to be filed within weeks. Whichever way Hungarian courts rule, the case will move quickly toward another CJEU referral, and the Commission has signaled it is prepared to open infringement proceedings before the test case concludes.

Slovakia: open defiance

Slovakia’s government has moved in the opposite direction. The 2025 Slovak constitutional amendment recognizing only “two genders” and barring legal gender recognition was finalized after Shipova was already pending in Luxembourg, and the government has been explicit that it does not intend to amend the constitution to comply with EU jurisprudence. Justice Minister Boris Susko’s office issued a statement on April 8 saying that the constitutional amendment “reflects the will of the Slovak people” and that EU institutions have no authority to override that will.

This is the position the European Commission cares about most. Slovakia is the test case for whether overt defiance of CJEU rulings on fundamental rights will trigger consequences proportionate to the defiance. The Commission has, according to ILGA-Europe, opened a pre-infringement dialogue with Slovakia and given the Fico government a deadline to demonstrate compliance steps before formal proceedings begin.

What to watch over the next year

Three things will determine whether Shipova becomes a turning point or a paper victory.

First, whether the European Commission opens formal Article 258 proceedings before the end of 2026. Infringement procedures take years to fully run, but the Commission’s willingness to start the clock on at least one of the three holdout states — most likely Slovakia — would set a precedent for the others.

Second, whether the Bulgarian parliament introduces a general LGR statute. The political math is uncertain: Bulgaria has had four governments in three years and the current minority cabinet has limited bandwidth. But the case-by-case workaround is unsustainable, and the cost of inaction is European Commission action.

Third, whether the new Magyar government in Hungary uses Shipova as a face-saving way to begin re-engaging with EU rule-of-law standards. A small, technical compliance step on trans recognition — not full repeal of the constitutional amendment, but a free-movement-claimant administrative pathway — would be a politically cheap signal that the Hungarian government’s broader EU reset is real.

The deeper significance of Shipova, beyond the three resistant member states, is that it joins a small but growing body of CJEU jurisprudence holding that legal gender recognition is not a discretionary social policy but a feature of EU citizenship itself. That framing is what gives the ruling teeth. The next two months will tell us whether the teeth bite.