A new report suggests Europe has entered a new phase, whereby critical voices are increasingly silenced by authoritarian-leaning governments spanning Hungary to Russia and Turkey.
Nikolaj Nielsen
Tactics once used to target people primarily from the LGBTI community have now been translated into laws used to criminalise and silence dissent more broadly, says a new report.
Out Thursday (26 February), the 179-page annual report from the ILGA-Europe, a pan-European network defending gay rights, offers mixed views on how people from the community were treated throughout much of Europe in 2025.
The overall message suggests Europe has entered a new phase whereby critical voices are increasingly silenced by authoritarian-leaning governments, spanning from Hungary to Russia and Turkey.
The annual report follows intense pressure from primarily conservative and rightwing circles against so-called wokeism and identity politics.
Hungary gets a special mention in the report for having banned the gay Pride march in Budapest and then again in Pécs, a city in the south of the country.
The legislative moves proposed by Hungary’s ruling homophobic Fidesz party last year banned LGBTI-themed assemblies amid claims it harms children.
“This marked the first time a member state of the European Union used primary legislation to prohibit LGBTI public assemblies, with organisers facing criminal proceedings in connection with such events,” says the report.
József Szájer, a founding member of Fidesz, was caught fleeing a police raid at a gay orgy during a Covid lockdown in Brussels in 2022.
Although no longer with Fidesz, Szájer’s fiasco was said to lay bare the hypocrisy behind a party that espouses so-called family-oriented Christian values.
Szájer was not the only Fidesz loyalist embroiled in a scandal.
So-called ‘child-protection’ laws
In 2021, Hungary introduced a so-called “child protection” law, which was framed as a measure to protect minors and crack down on paedophile crimes.
The European Commission launched an investigation into the measure in 2022 and it is currently pending before the Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
But then in 2023, top Fidesz politicians, including a former justice minister, were forced to resign after it emerged the government had pardoned a paedophile director of a children’s home.
Meanwhile, Fidesz last year turned its legislative firepower against gay pride by restricting the freedom of assembly.
Police were also empowered to use digital biometric surveillance to identify any one who attended such marches.
The assembly restrictions were then followed by a “Bill on the Transparency of Public Life”, which enables the government to compile a blacklist of organisations if they are deemed to threaten Hungary’s sovereignty.
The ILGA report situates these measures within a broader trend that has taken shape across Europe and Central Asia over the past decade.
It notes that governments have increasingly turned to criminal laws targeting so‑called “propaganda” or extremism, imposed foreign‑funding restrictions, and misused administrative procedures to shut down civil society groups.
At the same time, constitutional amendments defining sex in narrowly biological terms have contributed to the exclusion of trans, intersex and non‑binary people from public life, alongside growing limits on public assembly often justified on grounds of child protection or public order, it says.
“These measures restrict who can organise, speak, assemble, or be legally recognised in public life, reshaping the conditions for civic participation,” says the report.
