15-year-old Natasa (pseudonym), a young Roma girl, is one of millions of people forced to flee Ukraine because of the devastating war - causing the largest humanitarian crisis in Europe since WWII. Seeking safety and shelter in Hungary with her mother, Natasa instead encountered a different kind of struggle: systemic neglect, discrimination, and institutional violence. Shortly after arriving, Natasa discovered she was pregnant. It was her second pregnancy — her first had ended in miscarriage. She and her mother, living in precarious conditions under a government rent subsidy program, were referred to EMMA — a maternal health and rights advocacy organization — by a housing service provider. During their first meeting, EMMA provided Natasa with non-judgmental counselling on her options, including both continuing the pregnancy and abortion care. EMMA also arranged for a pregnancy test at a public health center. But instead of compassionate care, Natasa was met with suspicion and coercion. A doctor insisted on a vaginal ultrasound despite her fears that it might cause another miscarriage. The doctor then openly disapproved of her decision to continue the pregnancy, making Natasa unwilling to return. EMMA immediately referred her to a trauma-informed gynaecological clinic, where she finally received respectful and supportive prenatal care. For a time, things were going well. Natasa attended regular check-ups, engaged in childbirth preparation, and received psychosocial support. But the sense of safety she had begun to regain was once again shattered when her landlord evicted her due to her pregnancy, and her partner became abusive. With intervention from a specialist in domestic violence, Natasa’s home environment became once more stable. At 35 weeks of pregnancy, Natasa was hospitalized due to a suspected rupture of the amniotic sac. Once again, her voice and autonomy were ignored. Her refusal of a vaginal examination was ignored, and she was treated disrespectfully, leading her to leave the hospital against medical advice. A private physician later confirmed there was no rupture and advised a follow-up. When she returned to the hospital, the abuse escalated. Doctors attempted another vaginal exam without her consent, prevented her from contacting her mother, and conducted the procedure without the presence of a legal guardian. As a result, her cervix was damaged and she began to bleed. She was urgently transferred to another hospital. There, finally, she was treated with the dignity and care she deserved and safely gave birth to a healthy baby girl. What Natasa endured is gynecological and obstetric violence — a violation of human rights rooted in racism, sexism, and ageism. Following the birth, Natasa and her mother received daily emotional support from EMMA. Legal aid was arranged, and she was connected with professionals to explore justice and accountability to reclaim her voice. Two months on from the delivery, Natasa and her daughter are doing well. Natasa has received evidence-based contraceptive care counselling and made an informed choice to have an IUD inserted. Natasa’s story is not unique, but it is urgent. The fact that Natasa repeatedly faced a lack of compassion and even violence from medical staff speaks volumes about how widespread the problem truly is. Underage refugee women, particularly from marginalized groups like the Roma community, face intersecting forms of violence when accessing sexual and reproductive healthcare. Their safety, dignity, and rights must be non-negotiable. Due to the work of organisations such as EMMA everyone, regardless of their background, age, legal status, or financial means, can receive respectful care that prioritizes their well-being and autonomy.

IPPF condemns the Hungarian government’s issuing of a decree that, from 15 September, will force women seeking abortion care to listen to the embryonic cardiac activity before being able to access fundamental healthcare. This requirement has no medical purpose and serves only to humiliate women. It will make accessing abortion more burdensome. The new legislation was issued as a fait accompli by the government in Hungary without any expert or public consultation and without hearing from women.  Under Hungarian law, abortion care is available in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy on medical grounds or if the pregnant woman is in severe crisis. This new decree is the latest in a series of measures imposed by the government to undermine women’s autonomy. For example, dissuasive and intrusive mandatory counselling sessions have also been imposed on women seeking abortion care, with the sole result of humiliating and undermining their emotional health. This new legislative act from Viktor Orban’s government is shocking, but it is a development that women rights defenders in Hungary have already feared for some time, given the government’s disregard for women’s dignity and health and for democracy. IPPF joins our Hungarian partners in calling for the government to stop harassing women, and take urgent and effective measures that support contraceptive access and relationships and sexuality education, together with ensuring social policies that empower people to live freely. “As in Poland, it is tragic to see EU citizens paying the price, as their mental health, intimate lives and freedom are sacrificed on the altar of a government’s ultra-conservative agenda. Orban’s government knows very well that Hungarian public opinion is in favour of reproductive rights and that is why it is trying to chip away incrementally at women’s self-determination,” said IPPF European Network’s Irene Donadio.   Media contacts: Irene Donadio, IPPF EN: 0032 (0)491 719 390 - idonadio@ippfen.org ; enpress@ippfen.org Nőkért Egyesület, Women’s Association, Hungary: 0036 70 620 2168 - antoni.rita@gmail.com Julia Spronz, Patent, Hungary: julia.spronz@gmail.com    Illustration by: Olga Mrozek for IPPF x Fine Acts

Civil society organisations write to the European Commission and the Council asking them to refrain from approving recovery funds to the governments of Poland and Hungary and instead provide direct support to local authorities, civil society and human rights defenders providing for refugees of the war. Neither Poland, nor Hungary, have made meaningful progress to restore the checks and balances necessary to uphold the rule of law and reinstate an independent judiciary.  The war in Ukraine should not be used as a pretext to weaken the rule of law mechanism and let any Member State get away with serious rule of law violations. If anything, this war shows the very real dangers that come with a country dismantling the rule of law and democratic oversight. This is not the time to set aside concerns about the rule of law and respect of fundamental rights in EU Member States. Unblocking funds whereas the concerns in the countries remain as serious as ever, would be detrimental.  

High on the list of things that Viktor Orban doesn’t want you to know: homosexuality is a Hungarian invention. Before human rights campaigner Karl-Maria Kertbeny sat down to write a quiet letter to a leading German activist in 1868, the word homosexual did not exist. Neither did heterosexual. When he invented these terms, Kertbeny became the first European thinker to give queer people a neutral label for their experience, and to say it was equal to straightness. Many people continue to lay flowers at his grave in Budapest in recognition of this important Hungarian contribution to the history of LGBQ* dignity. Until recently, Hungarian society has continued in this vein, not always a pioneer but frequently showing its neighbours an example of steady advancement in the field of human rights. Homosexual sex was decriminalized there in 1961, relatively early compared to other contemporary socialist states in Europe – East Germans and Bulgarians, for example, had to wait until 1968. In the EU era, Hungary’s parliament adopted the bill to approve civil partnerships in 2007, making them accessible to their citizens substantially faster than in Croatia (2014), Greece (2015) or Italy (2016). And earlier this year, an independent poll demonstrated that the Hungarian people are still carrying on this tradition of reaching gradually for social progress: 59% of Hungarians believe that gay couples should have equal rights to adopt a child, an increase from the 42% who felt the same way in 2013. This historical trajectory is rather inconvenient to Mr Orban. He would like Hungarians to believe the European value of LGBTQI* freedom is a Western import, a foreign ‘ideology’, rather than something their country did much to realize long before the inception of the European Union. Fidesz, his ruling right-wing party, has a particular passion for victimizing LGBTQI* people, parcelling up actions that trample on trans and queer people’s human rights with measures designed to shut down intellectual life and access to education. Academic gender studies have been banned in Hungarian universities since 2018. In 2020, transgender and intersex people were robbed of their access to legal gender recognition. Summer 2021 saw the regime manoeuvring its wide-ranging package of amendments to “Child Protection” and “Family Protection” laws into place: as of July, it is illegal to share information about LGBTQI* lives with young people under the age of 18. Sexuality education that tells the truth about the range of human sexuality and gender has been banned in schools; no content relating to queer or trans people can be shown on television if a child might see it; booksellers within two hundred metres of a school or a church face prosecution for stocking literature featuring queer or trans characters. Political homophobia spreads    Hungary is of course not alone in falling victim to such deterioration. These measures are fed by, and feed into, a wave of human rights rollbacks threatening millions of Europeans. Hate against LGBTQI* people is increasingly legitimized through measures that forbid any public mention of their existence, on the pretext of shielding children from supposedly harmful knowledge. In Romania this summer, far-right party AUR felt emboldened enough by Hungary’s latest move to announce its own proposed law to “limit the representation or promotion of homosexuality and gender reassignment among minors”. While the party are not currently in government, and were likely angling for attention during a quiet period, this threat comes hot on the heels of several years of attempts to give parents the right to control what information about gender and sexuality their children receive in school, and to enshrine homophobia in the country’s constitution with a proposed amendment regarding marriage rights. Just as in Hungary, a homophobic, transphobic and anti-education bill that was presented in Poland’s parliament in 2019 was dressed up as a protection against paedophilia. It would make anyone providing comprehensive sexuality education to young people in schools a criminal. That bill is currently frozen in legislative process, neither adopted nor rejected. Recent announcements suggest that it will soon reappear in the form of a much broader, more dangerous anti-LGBTQ* law, more similar to Hungary’s, that will apply to many other settings beside schools. Since then, there has been a continuous escalation in brutal state violence committed against those protesting Poland’s shutdown of reproductive healthcare – their shocking testimonies must be read to be believed. Anyone following the situation can see how a law preventing street demonstrators even mentioning LGBTQI* rights – in case a child reads a placard - will be hugely destructive for any and all people taking a stand on these connected struggles. The paradox of conservative censorship   Thinking about public expression is key to understanding what exactly is going on here. It is, after all, categorically strange for right-wing parties to be so enthusiastic about state intervention in private life, and so violently opposed to the protection of that profoundly libertarian value: the right to say what you like. This is not a phenomenon unique to central Europe, but a trend across the continent – consider the appetite for sexuality-related censorship of far-right groups Fratelli d'Italia, VOX in Spain, and Portugal’s Chega. Certainly for those hardline conservatives who are in power, one goal is to misdirect public attention from their mishandling of economic, and latterly pandemic, issues. Framing LGBTQI* citizens as the current major threat to national stability is a smoke-and-mirrors diversion tactic, designed to disguise holes in a manifesto or deflect state accountability for preventable deaths, rocketing unemployment, and spiralling hopelessness. These leaders are exploiting multiple issues that trigger primal fears (“other” groups threatening social order, harm coming to one’s children and so on), in order to make loss of freedoms seem more palatable and therefore get away with shutting down dissent. A clear message from European leaders   The fight to win back decades of gains in human rights, sexual autonomy and self-determination depends on affected citizens participating fully and freely in national and international exchange. This is what IPPF EN seeks to facilitate. We bring together activists operating on different progressive causes in challenging European contexts to share knowledge, increase their sense of community, and help them develop their tactics. The strong stances we saw from European leaders expressed in June’s letter from the EU Council have been an encouraging sign of international solidarity, as have the Commission’s infringement procedures launched against Poland and Hungary in July, and the tabling of a wider parliamentary resolution on protecting LGBTQI* rights across Europe in the September 13th plenary. As these darkly conservative narratives play out to the same rhythm, again and again, it’s clear that such messages from European leaders must be backed up with financial support for activists if we want to combat an increasingly organized international threat. It might seem counterintuitive, but the upcoming referendum that Orban has scheduled on his offensive law should offer a glimmer of hope. The referendum questions are patently biased, written to confuse and manipulate, leaving people no way to express disagreement with the law and therefore no choice but to boycott it if they don’t support hate. We should see this as an admission of weakness. Orban fears he cannot count on a free vote to deliver a result against human rights, and so has engineered a rigged one. He knows there are plenty of people left who will resist him if they feel it is possible. It is down to the rest of us to ensure that it is. *Note: when we write LGBTQI*, we are referring to everybody who isn't straight and cis Main photo by Mercedes Mehling on Unsplash

IPPF EN deeply regrets that the Council Conclusions on “Gender Equality, Youth and Digitalisation” could not be adopted yesterday, due to Poland and Hungary’s efforts to remove any mention of LGBTIQ people in the text. Poland additionally opposed any reference to gender equality. It is unacceptable that the discriminatory stance of these two Member States blocked the adoption of strong and inclusive Council Conclusions. This is only one of the latest examples of the systematic efforts by a few Member States to undermine EU values and disregard human rights, targeting specifically LGBTIQ and gender equality. “Politics are not harmless. Attacks on LGBTIQ rights ‘on paper’ by some EU Member States in the Council do translate into discrimination, verbal attacks and hate crimes against individuals and communities. We must not back down in front of such illiberal moves and the EU must retain a strong and clear voice on its fundamental values. An attack against LGBTIQ rights is an attack on EU fundamental values and the EU itself.”, says Caroline Hickson, IPPF EN’s Regional Director.   The governments of Poland and Hungary claim that their refusal to include LGBTIQ youth in the text among other marginalized youth groups is a reflection of the Polish and Hungarian societies’ views. We know this is not true. In both countries, a vibrant and active civil society is actively pushing back on these illiberal politics. In Hungary, many supported gender studies programmes that the government targeted and attacked within universities. In Poland, whereas LGBTIQ rights organizations get increasingly physically attacked, more and more people attend Pride marches to reclaim public space. The EU must not give up on its LGBTIQ citizens, regardless of where they live. Member States should above all listen to the voices of young people themselves. The organisation of the Gender Equality and You(th) Conference in Vienna in October was a great initiative, to which our youth network YSAFE was glad to participate. The outcomes of the Conference had been reflected in the text of the Draft Council Conclusions. We therefore particularly regret that some Member States could not listen to and stand up for all young people. IPPF EN however welcomes the strong stance taken by the other 26 Member States, which refused to be pressured into giving up on EU fundamental values of equality, non-discrimination and inclusion. Although the Presidency Conclusions do not have the same legal weight as Council Conclusions, we are glad that the text has not been watered down. In addition, IPPF EN strongly supports the Joint Non-Paper led by Malta and signed by 19 Member States, which calls for much greater effort to advance LGBTIQ equality, and for the adoption of a comprehensive EU LGBTIQ Strategy. It further calls for better data collection on discrimination and violence against LGBTIQ people, funding and space for civil society working on these issues, and for the EU to serve as a platform of exchange for Member States to collectively strive to uphold all human rights, for all. We are very much looking forward to working together with all European institutions, including the next European Parliament and European Commission, to ensure this strategy sees the light of day.