Hungarian prosecutors drop charges against Budapest mayor for organising Pride march

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BUDAPEST - Hungarian prosecutors have dropped charges against Budapest's liberal Mayor Gergely Karacsony over his role in organising an LGBTQ+ rights rally in 2025, prosecutors said on Thursday.

Tens of thousands of protesters marched through Budapest in June 2025 despite a police ban, turning the Pride march into a mass anti-government demonstration in one of the biggest shows of opposition to former nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Orban was ousted in a landmark election on April 12 after 16 years in power by the centre-right Tisza party.

Prosecutors charged Karacsony before the election in January, saying he had violated the law by organising and leading a banned assembly.

Karacsony had attempted to circumvent the police ban by registering the Pride march as a municipal event, which he argued did not require a permit. The march in downtown Budapest ultimately went ahead peacefully.

Prosecutors said on Thursday that they dropped the charges against Karacsony, citing a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in late April which said that Hungary's 2021 "child protection" law violated EU law. This law served as a basis for banning the Pride event.

"Considering the ruling by the European Court ... the prosecutors dropped charges against the Budapest mayor for violating the law on freedom of assembly," they said.

The European court found that the legislation unlawfully restricted access to content portraying homosexuality and gender variance and breached fundamental rights and EU values.

(Reporting by Krisztina Than; Editing by Alex Richardson and Toby Chopra)

Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect.

This story was originally published June 4, 2026 at 5:47 AM.