BUDAPEST, Hungary — A authorities workplace in Hungary on Thursday levied a hefty tremendous towards a nationwide bookseller over a LGBTQ+ graphic novel, saying it violated a contentious regulation that prohibits the depiction of homosexuality to minors.
The bookseller, Lira Konyv, is Hungary’s second-largest bookstore chain. It was fined 12 million forints ($35,930) for putting the favored “Heartstopper” by British creator Alice Oseman in its youth literature part, and for failing to position it in closed packaging as required by a 2021 regulation.
The Budapest Metropolitan Authorities Workplace, which issued the patron safety tremendous, advised state information company MTI that it had performed an investigation into the shop’s promoting of the title.
“The investigation discovered that the books in query depicted homosexuality, however they had been however positioned within the class of kids’s books and youth literature, and weren’t distributed in closed packaging,” the workplace stated.
The tremendous relies on Hungary’s 2021 “little one safety” regulation, which forbids the show of gay content material to minors in media, together with tv, movies, commercials and literature. It additionally prohibits LGBTQ+ content material at school education schemes, and forbids the general public show of merchandise that depict or promote gender deviating from intercourse at delivery.
Hungary’s authorities insists that the regulation, a part of a broader statute that additionally will increase legal penalties for pedophilia and creates a searchable database of intercourse offenders, is critical to guard kids. However it’s seen by critics of the nation’s right-wing authorities as an try and stigmatize lesbian, homosexual, bisexual and transgender individuals.
In April, 15 international locations of the European Union backed authorized motion towards the regulation within the European Court docket of Justice, and the bloc’s high government, Ursula von der Leyen, has known as it “a shame.”
The tremendous towards Lira Konyv comes simply two days earlier than the Budapest Pleasure march, an annual occasion that attracts 1000’s of LGBTQ+ individuals and their supporters in Hungary’s capital.
In a press release, the Budapest Metropolitan Authorities Workplace stated it had ordered Lira Konyv to make sure the lawful distribution of the guide, and that it “will at all times take strict motion towards firms that don’t adjust to the regulation.”