AI Surveillance to be Deployed on Banned Budapest Pride

The yearly parade has been banned, and its organizers and attendees will be targeted with AI surveillance, facial recognition software, and automatic fines.

Christo - Wikimedia Commons

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A populist lawmaker comes to power and rails against immigrants, people of color, and the poor. Then he sets his sights on queer people. He ends legal recognition of the trans community, censors LGBT books and movies, and cracks down on schools for “encouraging” queerness.

He does not outright say he does not want to ban LGBT people. He says he only wants to shield children from offensive or provocative content. It doesn’t line up with “family” values. It’s about “common sense.” More bluntly, “We won’t let woke ideology endanger our kids.”

The natural conclusion, then, is that LGBT Pride must end. The yearly parade must be banned, and its organizers and attendees must be targeted with AI surveillance, facial recognition software, and automatic fines — this according to Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, who shepherded these policies through the country’s Parliament earlier this month.

As the legislative hearing commenced, some parliamentarians took bold action, setting off rainbow colored smoke bombs in the statehouse to try to disrupt the vote. Nonetheless, it passed in a 136-27 split. Thousands of Hungarians poured into the streets to protest.

Orbán, a Trump ally and autocrat, has antagonized queer Hungarians since he took office in 2010. The Eastern European country was once a relative trailblazer for LGBT rights, but now, it’s become an inspiration for U.S. conservatives in their own crusade against the queer community.

“In 1997, Hungarians held the first Pride march behind the fallen Iron Curtain,” noted Politico correspondent Csongor Körömi. “Almost three decades later, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is the first country in the European Union to ban the protest nationwide.”

The ban was enacted through an amendment to Hungary’s Child Protection Act. The original CPA censored LGBT content in schools. Now, the provision also outlaws events that engage in the “depiction or promotion” of LGBT identities to anyone under 18 years old.

Advocates and scholars have denounced the anti-Pride policy as a violation of Hungarians’ civil rights. “The law, which curtails the right of assembly when it pertains to supporting LGBT rights, also authorizes authorities to use facial recognition technology to identify event organizers and attendees, with both groups facing fines of up to €500 for exercising their freedoms of assembly and expression,” Cristian González Cabrera, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, wrote in a recent dispatch. “The prime minister made clear the intention of the law is to ban Pride.”

It was submitted and signed by the president over just one day, Cabrera noted. “The lightning speed of the law’s adoption is the latest disturbing example of the ruling party’s blatant disregard for the rule of law and democratic checks and balances.”

In an article for The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz questioned whether Hungary’s draconian laws may “offer a glimpse of our authoritarian future.” In August 2022, Orbán was the opening speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, where he called for Christian nationalists to unite for a global “culture war.” Florida Republicans allegedly modeled the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” laws after Orbán’s policies; Governor Ron DeSantis met with Hungary’s President Katalin Novák, an Orbán appointee, in 2023.

That same year, a former Hungarian diplomat told The Guardian that the country’s politicians and mega-donors flooded the U.S. political ecosystem. “These outreaches have increased for the past nine months, and more government officials have visited the U.S. than before,” the diplomat said. Orbán’s administration has been a welcoming host for the likes of Steve Bannon, former Vice President Mike Pence, and far-right influencers like Dennis Prager and Milo Yiannopoulos.

In spite of the Pride ban, organizers said they intend to follow through with the scheduled festivities. “This is not child protection,” Budapest Pride wrote of the bill in a social media statement. “This is fascism.”

Even more, organizers said, “We will fight this new fascist ban.”

Budapest’s liberal-leaning mayor said he will support his constituents in this fight. “Whatever anyone says, there will be Pride in Budapest this June,” Mayor Gergely Karácsony told Politico. “It may even be bigger than ever before.”