In Pécs, Hungary, a Roma teacher has become the first Pride organiser to be criminally prosecuted in the history of the European Union.
Géza Buzás-Hábel, a Pécs Roma teacher, faces prison and becomes the first Pride organiser criminally charged in EU history. Photo: AP.You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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The application filed with the Pécs police on 4 September 2025 concerned a demonstration against the overpopulation of wild deer and stags. It had been registered with the authorities, who approved it. On the morning of 4 October, in the southern Hungarian university city of Pécs, a place of Ottoman mosques and Baroque spires, of Roman catacombs and quiet academic courtyards, a lawyer named Péter Heindl set off at the head of the march. Behind him, several thousand people followed. They waved rainbow flags and carried placards that read, in Hungarian, ‘It’s not a crime to love.’ They chanted for LGBTQ+ rights. A car painted in the colours of Hungary’s satirical Two-Tailed Dog Party blasted music while performers in zebra costumes danced behind it. The deer march, it turned out, was the fifth Pécs Pride.
The ruse belonged to a species of political theatre you find wherever the law has become absurd enough to require absurdity in response, a lineage that runs back through Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk and forward into every state that keeps generating the conditions for it. The Hungarian government completed the bit: officials declared that no Pride had taken place at all, that the thousands who had marched through Pécs were simply protesting against wild animals. The statement, in its deadpan brazenness, was indistinguishable from satire.
What lay behind the theatre was a criminal prosecution without precedent in the European Union. On 9 February 2026, the Pécs District Prosecutor’s Office charged Géza Buzás-Hábel, a thirty-two-year-old Roma teacher of Romani language and culture and the director of the Diverse Youth Network, with organising a prohibited assembly. He faces up to one year in prison. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and the European Roma Rights Centre have all confirmed: this is the first known criminal prosecution of a Pride organiser anywhere in the European Union. Four Hungarian human rights organisations, in a joint statement, placed it in a different geography entirely, calling it a case ‘so far only seen in Russia or Turkey’.
The prosecution is occurring inside the EU’s legal order. Hungary remains bound by the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled repeatedly that legislation banning Pride events violates the Convention (in cases concerning Poland, Russia and Lithuania). Every instrument to which Budapest is a signatory protects the right Buzás-Hábel exercised on that October afternoon. And yet the prosecution is coming from inside Europe’s human rights architecture, which makes the case something larger than a Hungarian domestic matter: a test of whether the Union will enforce its own founding commitments.
The legislation that enabled the prosecution was assembled quickly. In March 2025, Orbán’s coalition passed Act III of 2025, expanding the 2021 so-called child protection law, a statute already under infringement proceedings before the Court of Justice (sixteen member states and the European Parliament had joined the Commission’s case, the largest human rights proceeding in EU history). The bill was submitted on 17 March and adopted on 18 March in a single-day fast-track procedure. It came into force on 15 April. Police could now ban any gathering they deemed a violation of child protection provisions and deploy facial recognition against participants. Attendees faced fines of up to five hundred euros; organisers faced criminal charges. Then, on 14 April, parliament voted through the fifteenth amendment to Hungary’s Fundamental Law, declaring that a child’s right to ‘adequate physical, mental and moral development’ would take precedence over every other fundamental right except the right to life.
Buzás-Hábel had notified the Pécs police of the planned march on 4 September. The next day, they banned it. The stated grounds: that the event would expose children to prohibited content, including advocacy for same-sex marriage, for transgender legal recognition, and for the remembrance of LGBTQ+ victims of the Holocaust. (This last item bears repeating: the official position of the Hungarian state is that commemorating Holocaust victims constitutes a threat to children.) He appealed. The Kúria, Hungary’s supreme court, upheld the ban on 15 September. He marched anyway.
AFP counted between seven and eight thousand people in the streets that afternoon. Pécs’s mayor, Attila Péterffy, addressed the crowd and invoked Martin Luther King Jr., declaring that silence had ceased to be neutrality. Buzás-Hábel spoke from the stage under the march’s slogan: ‘We will not bow to fear.’ The crowd dispersed in the evening, peacefully. The police, who had turned up in force, watched them go and did nothing.
Twenty-four days passed. Then he was summoned to a police station and informed that he was a criminal suspect. Hungarian civil society organisations drew attention to the speed of it: in 2024, police had taken an average of 352 days to forward an indictment recommendation to prosecutors. Buzás-Hábel’s case was wrapped up in weeks. He told journalists he had exercised a fundamental right. He did not feel guilty. He had already lost his teaching positions, having been dismissed in 2024 from the state school where he had taught Romani language for nearly a decade and from a music centre where he had mentored young people for five years. He had been placed under secret service surveillance. He said none of it would stop him from organising Pride again.
He was not alone for long. On 28 January 2026, prosecutors went after a considerably bigger target: Budapest’s mayor, Gergely Karácsony, charged for organising the thirtieth Budapest Pride the previous June. That event had drawn up to three hundred thousand people, one of the largest anti-government demonstrations in years. Karácsony had sidestepped the police ban by declaring the march a municipal event; over seventy MEPs attended. He called himself a ‘proud defendant’ and wrote: ‘I will never accept, nor resign myself to, the idea that in my homeland it could be a crime to stand up for freedom.’ He was later awarded the Geuzenpenning, the Dutch prize for civic courage, named for resistance fighters the Nazis executed in 1941. Václav Havel is among its past recipients.
The gap between the two prosecutions tells the real story. Karácsony is the mayor of a European capital, a Green party politician with international allies. Prosecutors are seeking a fine. Buzás-Hábel is a Roma teacher from a provincial city who has no classroom left, no institutional shield, and faces a prison cell for doing what Karácsony did from a position of far greater vulnerability. ‘In the eyes of those in power,’ he told reporters, ‘I am just a speck of dust. This is directed at my broader community.’
The European Roma Rights Centre underlined what ought to have been obvious. Just days before the charges against Buzás-Hábel were filed, participants in Budapest’s annual ‘Day of Honour’ had marched through the capital in SS uniforms, under heavy police protection. Neo-fascist groups stage these commemorations yearly, with minimal interference. Hungary’s assembly law, as written and as applied, makes room for all of this. A Roma teacher leading a Pride march through a city of Baroque churches is, apparently, where it draws the line.
The European Commission’s 2025 Rule of Law Report registered ‘deep disappointment’ at Hungary’s failure to act on earlier recommendations, and has limited its response to an ‘assessment’. Four Hungarian human rights organisations asked the question that Brussels would prefer to leave rhetorical: how long can the Commission remain in ‘evaluation’ mode while a teacher faces imprisonment for exercising the rights the Union claims to guarantee? The European Pride Organisers Association put it with less diplomatic patience: ‘Pride is peaceful, legitimate, and protected. Criminalising organisers is unacceptable.’ What makes this urgent is what the prosecution establishes as precedent. Once a member state can charge someone for organising a peaceful march and the Union’s response amounts to an ongoing evaluation, the permission structure exists for any government in Bratislava or Warsaw that fancies the same approach. Hungary holds parliamentary elections in April 2026; Orbán’s Fidesz is behind Péter Magyar’s Tisza party in polls, and the political weather may change. But the legal precedent is already set, and it will be there for whoever wants to use it.
Géza Buzás-Hábel told the European Roma Rights Centre: ‘We decided to hold Pécs Pride, despite the ban, because Hungary must remain a European country.’ He is thirty-two. He is Roma and gay. He has no classroom. He has a criminal indictment for the act of walking through a city with several thousand other people who wished to be visible.
On the afternoon of 4 October 2025, that speck of dust was seven thousand people moving through the streets of Pécs, past the Ottoman mosque on Széchenyi Square, past the early Christian necropolis under UNESCO protection, past churches that have outlasted every empire that tried to claim them. The first criminal prosecution of a Pride organiser in the history of the European Union started here, with a man who was told to stand still and walked instead. The government continues to maintain that what happened in Pécs that day was a protest about deer. The deer were unavailable for comment.
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