Hungary is the only country in the European Union to have banned a Pride march. That single fact matters more than the 4.9 above, and it is worth understanding why the number doesn't show it.

The sequence is documented and recent. In 2020 legal gender recognition for trans people was ended and the constitution was amended to state that "the mother is a woman, the father is a man", restricting adoption. In 2021 the "child protection" law banned depiction of LGBTI lives to under-18s. In April 2025 parliament passed a constitutional amendment declaring that there are two sexes and that children's right to moral and spiritual development supersedes the right to peaceful assembly — the legal basis for banning LGBTI public events. Budapest Pride, due to mark its 30th anniversary in June 2025, was banned under it, and organisers were made criminally liable. In December 2025 reports emerged that police were seeking charges against the Mayor of Budapest for organising it. On the ILGA-Europe Rainbow Map, Hungary fell seven places to 37th of 49 with 23 points — its lowest score and ranking in the history of that index.

Two counterweights, both real. The march went ahead anyway, on a scale far beyond any previous year. And in April 2026 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Hungary's 2021 law breaches Article 2 of the EU Treaty — the article setting out the Union's founding values — the first time in the history of the EU that a member state has been found in breach of it in this way.

Why the score still reads mid-orange: Equaldex puts Hungary at 49 out of 100 (Legal Index 57, Public Opinion 40), and most of its legal weight sits on things Hungary does have — homosexuality is legal, registered partnership has existed since 2009. What that scoring cannot capture is direction, and the direction here is unambiguous.

Hungary is classified as a 'hybrid regime' by the EIU — the only EU member state with this classification. Independent media has been systematically bought out. The electoral system has been modified to entrench the ruling party.

Hungary has formally committed to policies that reinforce traditional gender roles. Abortion is legal but requires counselling and waiting periods. The government has defunded gender studies programmes.

The rule of law has been significantly eroded since 2010. The Constitutional Court has been packed with loyalists, and judicial independence is regularly questioned by EU institutions.

Not every country is measured on every value. Where the public data doesn't exist, we'd rather tell you than fill the gap with a guess — and Hungary is one of those cases.

The figure on our other country pages comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of what governments are doing about the worst forms of child labour, and that review covers the 131 countries which hold trade preferences with the United States. Hungary is not one of them, so it is never assessed. The obvious alternative doesn't help either: the ILO and UNICEF's global estimates, published in June 2025, are built on household surveys in 107 countries and leave out Europe and Northern America entirely — in their own words, "because of data limitations".

That absence is not the same as zero. The ILO's regional estimate puts around 2.3 million children aged 5 to 17 in child labour across Europe and Northern America, against under 1 per cent of children in high-income countries as a group. No national figure is published inside that. So the honest summary is that the record here is probably good and definitely unmeasured.