05/08/2026
In May, the European Commission gave its long-awaited answer to a new successful European Citizens’ Initiative: over 1.1 million citizens had asked Brussels for a binding, EU-wide ban on so-called “conversion practices.” What they got instead was a promise of a non-binding recommendation, due to be published only in 2027.
The issue
According to the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, roughly a quarter of LGBTIQ+ people in the EU have been subjected to interventions meant to change or suppress their sexual orientation or gender identity, a figure that climbs close to half among trans respondents. Greece tops the list at 38 per cent. Only nine member states currently have comprehensive bans in place: Malta, Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, and, most recently, the Netherlands. That leaves eighteen countries where the practice remains entirely unregulated. The UN has already called these practices torture. The World Health Organization stopped classifying homosexuality as a disorder in 1990. Yet the Commission’s own communication responding to the initiative concludes that a binding EU law “would not be effective,” pointing to the unanimity required in Council and the difficulty of proving a cross-border dimension to the crime.
A legal route exists; it doesn’t need a Treaty change
As EU law professor and The Good Lobby founder Professor Alberto Alemanno told EUobserver, the Council can add conversion practices to the EU’s list of “euro-crimes” under Article 83(1) TFEU by unanimous decision alone, “no treaty change needed.” Because the UN already treats these practices as torture, he argues, they fit within the EU’s existing framework for prosecuting serious cross-border exploitation of persons, the same legal basis already used for trafficking and sexual exploitation of children. It’s not a hypothetical shortcut. The Commission itself used comparable reasoning when it proposed adding hate speech and hate crime to the euro-crimes list back in 2021, a file that, tellingly, has also been gathering dust in Council ever since. The obstacle was never the law. It’s political will.
What a recommendation can’t do
A Commission recommendation is a useful tool for sharing best practice and nudging capitals that lack awareness of the issue. But a recommendation can’t force the eighteen member states without bans to legislate, and it gives victims no right to redress. It’s also a weak tool against how these practices actually operate today. Survivors interviewed by EUobserver describe a shift away from the obvious language of “pray the gay away” toward euphemisms like “spiritual renewal” or “self-actualisation”, the same coercion, rebranded to survive scrutiny. Soft law struggles to keep up with that. ACT, the NGO that organised the initiative, has already said as much: recommendations alone will have little effect without sustained Commission pressure on member states to legislate. The European Parliament made the same case in 2024, calling on the Commission to explore every available legal avenue.
What we’re calling for
The Good Lobby is joining that call. We believe the Commission and Council should:
- Table the euro-crimes proposal. Begin the Article 83(1) TFEU process now, rather than waiting to see whether a 2027 recommendation changes minds that a decade of evidence hasn’t.
- Pair any recommendation with real accountability. If member states are asked to report on implementation, that data should be published and scrutinised, not filed away.
- Extend victims’ rights protections to conversion-practice survivors explicitly, rather than leaving it to chance whether national law criminalises the practice at all.
Citizens did their part: they organised, they gathered signatures across a quarter of member states, and they built the first successful ECI on LGBTIQ+ rights. The legal path forward exists and doesn’t require reopening the Treaties. What’s missing is the will to walk it. That’s the gap civil society needs to keep pushing to close.