Data protection rules guarantee transgender rights: EU court

Hungary in 2020 banned the official registration of sex change and legally recognising the identities of transgender people.

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban in 2020 banned the official registration of sex change and legally recognising the identities of transgender people. Picture: AFP

The EU’s top court ruled Thursday that Hungary must record transgender people’s “lived” identity, citing the bloc’s data protection rules, a first win for the LGBTQ community since a 2020 legal change.

“The Court observes that, under the GDPR (data protection rules) … the data subject has the right to obtain … the rectification of inaccurate personal data,” said the European Union’s Court of Justice (CJEU).

Hungary, governed since 2010 by nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in 2020 banned the official registration of sex change and legally recognising the identities of transgender people.

In 2022, an Iranian transgender person with refugee status in Hungary requested that the official register, in which he was recorded as a woman — his sex at birth — be amended.

He had obtained refugee status eight years earlier by invoking his transgender identity based on medical certificates.

But authorities refused his request to amend the register, saying he had not proved that he had undergone gender reassignment surgery.

The Iranian then filed a case at the Budapest High Court, which turned to the EU court.

The CJEU said that under European law, everyone has the right to have data rectified.

“If the purpose of collecting those data was to identify the data subject, those data would appear to refer to that person’s lived gender identity, and not to the identity assigned to them at birth,” the court said.

“In that context, the court clarifies that a member state cannot rely on the absence, in its national law, of a procedure for the legal recognition of transgender identity in order to limit the exercise of the right to rectification,” it said.

It is now up to the national court in Hungary to rule on the Iranian’s case in accordance with the decision.

Orban’s government has passed a series of laws slammed by activists in Hungary and by the EU for curbing LGBTQ rights.