Spain has overtaken Malta to become the European country with the strongest protection for LGBTQ rights, ending the island nation’s 10-year run at the top of the annual ILGA Europe rankings.
Every year, ILGA Europe releases a “Rainbow Map” and LGBTQ Rights Index, ranking 49 European countries based on their laws and policies that impact LGBTQ people. Each country receives a score from 0 to 100% and is assigned a color along a rainbow spectrum on ILGA’s interactive map.
This ranking is supported by ILGA’s Annual Survey on the Human Rights Situation of LGBTI People in Europe and Central Asia, which examines how countries’ laws and policies impact the daily lives of LGBTQ people. The findings have been validated by more than 250 activists, legal experts and policy experts across the region.
Each country’s score reflects its policies across seven areas, including anti-discrimination protections, family rights, hate crime and hate speech laws, legal gender recognition, intersex bodily autonomy, freedom of assembly and expression, and LGBTQ-friendly asylum policies.
In this year’s index, Spain received an overall score of 88.70%, with perfect scores for family rights, civil society protection and LGBTQ-friendly asylum policies. The country also received high scores for anti-discrimination laws and legal gender recognition, but low scores for hate crime protections and intersex physical autonomy.
ILGA said Spain’s rise to the top of the rankings was driven by efforts to depathologise transgender identities in healthcare, expand legal protections, create an independent equal treatment body and block anti-transgender legislation.
Malta, which received an overall score of 87.33%, fell to second place mainly due to Spain’s sudden rise from fifth place in 2025. ILGA noted that Malta still lacks explicit LGBTQ protections, particularly regarding goods and services, the medical environment, and physical autonomy for intersex people.
Rounding out the top five are Iceland in third place with a score of 85.56%, followed by Belgium with 85.31% and Denmark with 85.10%, an increase of 5 points from last year. Finland came in 6th place with a score of 69.85%.
At the other end of the spectrum are countries with few protections for LGBTQ people, many of which actively persecute LGBTQ people and repress LGBTQ groups as part of broader efforts to consolidate political power and target minorities. In some of these countries, political leaders invoke conservative religious beliefs to justify anti-LGBTQ laws and policies.
Russia, whose government has declared the “international LGBT movement” an “extremist organization,” had the lowest score at 2%, followed by Azerbaijan at 2.25%, Turkey at 4.75%, Belarus at 7.01%, Armenia at 9.13%, and Georgia at 11.88%.
In general, Eastern European countries scored lower on many of the indicators used to determine ILGA’s rankings compared to Western European countries.
The UK remains in the middle of the rankings, at 22nd place, with a score of 43.90%, just above the continental average of 42.82%. However, the country lost two points from last year following policy decisions taken in response to a 2025 Supreme Court ruling that limited the legal definition of “woman” to those assigned female at birth.
ILGA Europe Deputy Director Katrin Hugendubel said: press release that advancing LGBTQ-friendly legislation often requires strong political leadership; Still, she pointed out that legal protections do not always translate into equal living.
For example, LGBTQ people in Spain can still face harassment, discrimination, and violence despite the country’s top ranking, especially if the law is not fully enforced. a report According to a study by the LGTBI+ Spanish Federation, assaults against LGBTQ people have increased by 15% since 2024, driven in part by anti-LGBTQ hate speech that critics say is fueling violence against sexual and sexual minorities.
“Spain’s No. 1 ranking is a powerful example of what is possible when governments make a deliberate choice to advance equality, rather than retreat from it,” Hugendeuber said. “We see the same spirit in leaders like Zoran Mamdani in New York, who refuse to bow to current authoritarian pressures and instead choose to stand with their communities. Of course, more needs to be done in Spain, but this is a reminder that political courage is a choice, and governments that make it can effectively resist.”
Source: Metro Weekly – www.metroweekly.com
