The foreign minister said the “liberal mainstream” has launched a “global fake news attack” on Hungary regarding recently approved legislation on the protection of children and stricter punishment for paedophilia.
Speaking on public broadcaster Kossuth Rádió on Sunday, Péter Szijjártó said, “everything they say is lies, everything they say has no connection whatsoever to the legislation that we approved in the interest of protecting children.” The legislation, he added, declares that children must be defended from paedophiles, on the one hand, and that the education of children regarding sexual orientation is exclusively the right of parents, on the other. “The liberal mainstream’s suggestion that the law discriminates against some groups of society is a lie,” he said.
Commenting on the matter of the legislation becoming an issue at the recent European Union summit as well as at a EURO2020 match between Hungary and Germany, Minister Szijjártó said “the liberal mainstream is incapable of accepting that, in Hungary, the patriotic government, which operates on the basis of the mandate of the Hungarian people, makes the national interest a priority”. He said “they cannot stand” that Hungary’s government has won three parliamentary elections in a row, that Hungary achieved one of the highest rates of economic growth in Europe before the crisis, and that policy measures addressing the challenges of the coronavirus crisis were “among the most successful, both economically and in terms of health care”, so they “find something wrong with every single one of our laws”, even before the text is available in Hungarian.
The foreign minister said the illumination by Amnesty International of the Hungarian embassy in The Hague with rainbow colours for an hour on Friday, “with the assistance and support of local authorities”, was “an unprecedented incident”. He added that the act runs counter to the practices of international law and diplomacy which ensure defense by the host country of every embassy against all kinds of insults.