This morning, the European Court of Justice handed down its final verdict on the case brought in front of the court by Hungary and Poland on the European Union tying fund transfers to something they call “rule of law” in Brussels-speak.
The so-called rule of law or conditionality mechanism would see money withheld if a member state does not respect the bloc's core values. Or at least so they say.
Sadly, we know very well that this rule-of-law argument is just a façade. The ECJ’s decision is, in fact, an attack against Hungary’s child protection legislation, which is aimed at keeping LGBTQ activists out of schools, protecting Hungarian children from propaganda in sex education, and ensuring that decisions regarding their children’s upbringing remain the sole right of parents.
Don’t let them fool you. This is what it’s all about.
In a Budapest press conference earlier today, Hungary’s Minister of Justice Judit Varga said that with its latest ruling, the European Court of Justice has become a political actor. “A big, open international debate is taking place around our child protection law,” Varga said, adding that while Hungary has been in talks with Brussels on a multitude of issues since 2010, our views on child protection gave rise to “a big, new issue that’s causing this incredible attack on Hungary from Brussels.”
According to Minister Varga, Hungary even received a special letter from Brussels, asking us to change our family and child protection laws, which are, by the way, a matter of national competency and therefore fall far from Brussels’ sphere of authority.
This is, however, not the first time that one of our policies has faced a liberal crusade. In 2016, the Brussels bureaucracy tried to make us alter our strict migration and border protection policy to give way to hundreds of thousands of illegal, undocumented migrants who were so eager to reach Germany and other Western European countries.
In 2016, we did not give in to the attacks and called for a referendum on migration, in which 98 percent of Hungarians refused Brussels’ migration policy. Since then, several other EU member states have adopted our migration policy. Time has proven us right. And it is exactly this course of action that we will follow regarding our law on child protection.
Hungarian people will go to the polls on April 3, the same day as the general elections, and they will confirm or refuse the policy direction put forward by Prime Minister Orbán and his government