LGBT lobby wants to take Hungary to court for ban transgender names
Activists fly a giant heart balloon in rainbow colors in front of the parliament in Budapest. Photo AFP, Attila Kisbenedek
Central Europe
Hungary recently banned transgender name changes. The LGBT lobby disagrees with this decision and threatens to take the State to the European Court of Human Rights.
The Hungarian Constitutional Court ruled on Thursday that a law prohibiting name changes for transsexual people is not unconstitutional. That is reported by Remix.
The Court reconsidered whether the Hungarian State is justified in registering someone's sex at birth rather than his or her self-identified sex later in life. It ruled that the State is allowed to do so, even after sex reassignment.
The judges argued that knowing the birth sex of a person may be necessary for health care providers. In addition, it may be relevant to criminal justice policies, the sports sector, and even in labour law. These reasons are sufficient to justify any possible restrictions of privacy that transgender people may experience, the Court ruled.
The plaintiff that started the court case against the State, Background Society, disagrees with the ruling. It argues that the judges do not take fundamental human rights into account sufficiently. The NGO that promotes LGBT rights, therefore, threatens to take the issue to the European Court of Human Rights.
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