Anti-Male Hungarian Legislation

Below comes a DeepL translation of this post (archive).

Editor’s note: an updated version of the previous article has been published due to changes in Hungarian legislation. There has been a small but important improvement in the area of family law (the possibility to award joint parental custody if there is no agreement between the parents) but otherwise, men in Hungary are still at a noticeable legal disadvantage.

Whether a state’s legislation ensures equality between the sexes before the law is a particularly important measure of equality between women and men. To see what the situation is in Hungary in this respect, we have collected a list of laws that can be considered discriminatory on the grounds of sex.

We can see that in Hungary women and men are still not equal before the law. There are several laws that differentiate between the rights and obligations of women and men on the basis of gender. We see that all of them discriminate against men. In our view, this is due to systemic problems of gender inequality, such as the lack of international and national legal obligations guaranteeing equal rights for men, the high level of social acceptance of discrimination against men, and the low level of advocacy by national and international men’s movements.

While Hungary is bound by international treaties on women’s rights (e.g. Beijing, 1995), which Hungary has signed and ratified to prohibit discrimination against women, the prohibition of discrimination against men is not regulated in this way internationally, so the room for maneuver of domestic political forces is not as limited as in the case of discrimination against women. Gender-based discrimination against men is used systematically in Hungary and in neighboring countries for ideological, economic and other political reasons, without any obstacles. In addition to the lack of international legislation, there is also the problem that there is no meaningful criticism of this in public life in Hungary, there are no significant civil organisations such as women’s organisations that represent men’s rights to equal rights or men specifically affected by the law, and public opinion is generally less sensitive to these social issues affecting men.

Below we look at some of the domestic gender discriminatory laws.