Hungary's ruling party submits bill to ban Pride march

BUDAPEST (Reuters) -Hungary's ruling party submitted a bill to parliament on Monday that would ban the Pride march by LGBTQ+ communities and impose fines on organisers and people attending the event which Budapest has held for three decades.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban has criticised LGBTQ+ people and pledged to crack down on foreign funding of independent media, opposition politicians and NGOs in Hungary in recent weeks, stepping up his campaign ahead of elections due early next year.

Orban, a nationalist who faces an unprecedented challenge from a new surging opposition party, has scaled up his attacks on the media and LGBTQ+ people since the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

The bill submitted by his Fidesz party would ban Pride on the grounds that it could be considered harmful to children.

"The proposed bill amends the law governing the right of assembly by stipulating that it is banned to hold an assembly that violates the ban set out in the law on the protection of children," the legislation says.

It also says police can use face recognition cameras to identify people who attend the event in which participants march down Andrassy Avenue, a wide street in Budapest's city centre.

Orban has said Pride should not even bother to organise the event this year. Festival organisers, who say it poses no threat to children, responded by saying that freedom of assembly was a constitutional right.

"Despite the proposed amendment to the law, we plan to hold Budapest Pride," Pride organisers told Reuters via email, adding that there was a bigger need than ever for the march, and that they would not be silenced.

Budapest's liberal mayor Gergely Karacsony said in a Facebook post that the Pride march will be held this year and will maybe be bigger than ever.

Orban, in power since 2010, promotes a Christian-conservative agenda and in 2021 banned what it calls the "promotion of homosexuality" among under-18s despite strong criticism from rights groups and the European Union.

The 2021 law has caused anxiety among gay, bisexual and transgender Hungarians and the European Commission referred Hungary to the EU's Court of Justice over it in 2022.

(Reporting by Krisztina Than, editing by Ed Osmond)