Hungarian Rights Groups call for immediate repeal of discriminatory law on ‘protection of local identity’
23 March 2026
The law on the protection of local identity has led to a mass of discriminatory unlawful ordinances being issued, and should be repealed immediately, according to a joint statement issued on 18th March by civil rights groups including the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, TASZ, and the Roma Press Center. Even the government office in Nógrad County has acknowledged the validity of the rights defenders’ claims, and conceded that the laws are indeed discriminatory, and called on the relevant municipalities to repeal them.
The Hungarian Law on the Protection of Local Identity which entered into force on 1 July 2025, gave municipal authorities the right to adopt local decrees to defend their ‘fundamental right to self-identity’, to take action against ‘undesired directions of societal development’, and to determine who may move into a locality, and who may not.
As the ERRC warned in an open letter to the European Union, and a complaint to the Hungarian government last year, this law basically provided a legal framework for racial segregation, and allowed for the drafting of municipal decrees that systematically exclude Roma from taking up residence in towns and villages across Hungary; and described the law as “nothing less than apartheid by stealth.”
Since the adoption of the law, rights groups have monitored the dozens of decrees that have been enacted by local authorities, and taken joint action, including filing complaints, and issuing legal challenges. In complete contradiction to Minister Tibor Navracsics’s insistence that the intent of the law was not discriminatory, the impact has been exactly as forecast by rights groups. As the statement makes clear:
“Dozens of such decrees have been enacted since the law was adopted, primarily in the poorer, Roma-populated regions of the country. Civil society organizations are continuously monitoring the daily proliferation of decrees, and according to their experience, laws with essentially identical wording are being enacted, almost all of which tied the possibility of moving into the settlement to financial status and educational qualifications.”
Often, the decrees stipulated that a personal interview was required to permit settlement, which created yet another opportunity for the local authorities to make prejudiced decisions. According to the statement, the decrees are therefore clearly discriminatory, “as they distinguish people wishing to move in based on social status and wealth, thus indirectly providing an opportunity to keep Roma people away.”
As TASZ reported, by mid-November 2025, more than 130 identity decrees had been passed across the country, almost all of which were severely discriminatory: “Some required millions in financial contributions from those moving in, arbitrarily imposed high levels of education as a condition, and required personal interviews – all of which were clearly intended to keep disadvantaged, poorer, typically Roma families away.”
The Nógrád County Government Office determined that all but one of the examined decrees are severely discriminatory and must be repealed immediately. The rights defenders maintain that since identity decrees with the same content were issued in other parts of the country, their purpose is similarly not legitimate, and their primary intent is to exclude disadvantaged people, mainly of Romani origin, from their localities.
Clearly what has resulted is not isolated errors in the application of the law, but rather that the law itself has become a catalyst for systemic discriminatory local government practices. The law must therefore be completely revoked: “If a law leads to a mass of unlawful ordinances being issued, then subsequent correction of individual ordinances is not enough: the authorizing law itself must also be repealed.”
