Facial recognition at Budapest Pride March: Orban simultaneously attacks protest and the LGBTIQ+ community

This Saturday, the Hungarian police will have the authority to violate a range of fundamental rights. They will be allowed to enforce a ban on Pride and use facial recognition technology to identify and punish anybody who defies it.

This is not an isolated act, but part of a broader pattern: a deepening erosion of democratic principles and fundamental rights under Viktor Orbán’s government in recent years.

That authoritarian drift includes the Hungarian parliament restricting the right to protest by granting police broader discretion to ban protests, and banning the wearing of face coverings during public events, including protests, in 2018; ending legal recognition for trans people in 2020; adopting anti-LGBTQI+ laws, including a de facto ban on adoption by same-sex couples, also in 2020; banning gay people from featuring in school educational materials or TV shows for under-18s in 2021; and banning protests in support of Palestinians in 2023.

Now, Pride and protest are under attack, enabled by invasive and dangerous surveillance technology deployed without public transparency or debate.

At this week’s UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), Ádám Remport, a lawyer at INCLO member Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, spoke of the chilling effect of these developments. He emphasized how the mere threat of their enforcement has stifled freedom of expression in Hungary, and how little the public knew about the authorities’ FRT use, until the silencing became impossible to ignore. 

“The situation had to become this bad and severe for the people to start to even care about the problem,” he warned.

Ádám was at IGF as part of INCLO’s delegation, which presented its newly published principles for the use of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) by law enforcement, called Eyes on the Watchers: Challenging the Rise of Police Facial Recognition.

These principles are designed to guard against the abuse of fundamental rights, as seen in Hungary.

Hungary’s current use of FRT violates every single one of these principles.

These attacks on the LGBTQI+ community and the broader assault on the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly are not the way forward. To all those marching this Saturday, despite the personal risk such action poses, your courage is a reminder of what’s at stake.

We urge you to read and share our 18 principles because tools of repression must not go unchallenged. Understanding how facial recognition technology is being used – and misused against us – is a first step toward resisting it.

Eyes on the Watchers’ art by Alina Najlis @alinanajlis