Tomorrow, Europe's Top Court Rules on Hungary's Anti-LGBTQ Law — the Biggest Human Rights Case in EU History

On Tuesday, April 21, the Court of Justice of the European Union will hand down a judgment that legal scholars have been watching for nearly five years. The case — formally European Commission v. Hungary (Case C-769/22) — is, in the words of multiple academics who have followed it closely, the largest human rights case in the history of the European Union.

At issue is a 2021 Hungarian law that prohibits the “portrayal and promotion” of homosexuality and gender transition to anyone under 18. It applies to books, films, television, advertising, education and public information campaigns. Viktor Orbán’s government sold it as child protection. The European Commission called it what it was: state-imposed invisibility, engineered to make it impossible for LGBTQ+ Hungarians to exist in public life.

Tomorrow’s ruling will tell us what the EU is willing to enforce when one of its own member states decides that the treaties don’t apply.

How we got here

Hungary passed the law in June 2021. Within weeks, the European Commission opened an infringement proceeding, and by July 2022 the case was before the ECJ. What happened next was unprecedented: 16 EU member states — Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden — joined the Commission as applicants. So did the European Parliament. No member state intervened on Hungary’s behalf.

On November 19, 2024, the case was heard by all 27 judges of the Grand Chamber sitting together — a format reserved for cases the Court considers foundational.

Then, on June 5, 2025, Advocate General Tamara Ćapeta issued her non-binding opinion. AG opinions don’t decide cases, but the Grand Chamber follows them more often than not. Ćapeta’s opinion was unusually direct. She found the Hungarian law “unscientific, based on a prejudice” that LGBTI lives are lesser than non-LGBTI lives, and wrote that it “attempted to impose a climate of hostility and a culture of stigma on LGBTI people.” She concluded that Hungary had violated Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union — the provision that binds every member state to “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.”

Why the legal theory matters as much as the outcome

Article 2 TEU is the EU’s values clause. Everyone agrees it exists. For years, it was also the provision nobody quite knew how to enforce. Infringement proceedings — the Commission’s main tool for holding member states to EU law — had traditionally been built on specific directives and regulations. Values themselves were treated as aspirational.

Commission v. Hungary is the first time the Commission has ever asked the Court to treat Article 2 as a freestanding legal obligation that one member state can be sued for violating. It is also the first infringement proceeding to rely on Article 1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights — the right to human dignity — as a standalone basis.

If the Grand Chamber adopts Ćapeta’s reasoning, it rewrites the EU’s enforcement architecture. Values become law. “Shared commitments” become prosecutable obligations. And the Commission gets a tool it can point at Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and any future member state that tries to follow Orbán’s playbook.

If the Court rules narrowly — finding Hungary in breach only of specific consumer-protection or audiovisual directives without reaching Article 2 — the law comes off the books, but the precedent stays modest.

Either way, the law loses. Nobody expects Hungary to win.

The political context has already shifted

When the case was filed, Orbán was at the height of his power. When the Grand Chamber heard arguments in late 2024, he was still prime minister. By the time the ruling lands tomorrow, he is not.

Péter Magyar’s Tisza party swept the April 11 parliamentary election with a two-thirds supermajority, ending 16 years of Fidesz rule. The new government has the constitutional votes to repeal Hungary’s LGBTQ+ restrictions on its own, and Magyar has already signaled that the 2025 Pride ban will be rolled back. The 2021 propaganda law is a harder question — Magyar’s platform didn’t commit to repealing it — but Tuesday’s ruling may make the decision for him.

A finding of Article 2 violation would effectively require Hungary to dismantle the law or face financial penalties under Article 260 TFEU. The new government would probably welcome the cover. Repealing a popular law by your own choice is politically expensive. Repealing it because the European Court of Justice told you to is considerably cheaper.

What the ruling can’t fix

Ten years of propaganda don’t reverse because a court strikes down the statute that codified them. Hungarian LGBTQ+ organizations lost staff, funding, and public standing under Fidesz. Schools stopped teaching about same-sex families. Libraries shrink-wrapped books. Trans Hungarians still cannot legally change their documents, a separate restriction frozen into place by the Constitutional Court in 2023.

Tomorrow’s ruling doesn’t touch any of that. It touches the law. But the law shaped the culture — for a decade it told teachers, publishers, librarians and parents that LGBTQ+ visibility was legally suspect — and stripping the legal scaffolding is where cultural recovery starts.

What to watch for

Three things: whether the Court reaches Article 2 TEU and Article 1 CFR as standalone grounds, whether it finds a violation of the Charter’s non-discrimination provisions, and what it orders Hungary to do. Infringement rulings typically require the offending state to bring itself into compliance “without undue delay,” with financial penalties available if they don’t.

A ruling is expected Tuesday morning in Luxembourg. Whatever the Court says, it will shape how the EU handles its next rule-of-law crisis — and the one after that.