Belgium has solid protections on this dimension, comparable to most Western European countries. Some gaps exist but the overall picture is positive.

Belgium has solid protections on this dimension, comparable to most Western European countries. Some gaps exist but the overall picture is positive.

Belgium has solid protections on this dimension, comparable to most Western European countries. Some gaps exist but the overall picture is positive. Abortion is legal on request up to 14 weeks.

Belgium has solid protections on this dimension, comparable to most Western European countries. Some gaps exist but the overall picture is positive.

Not every country is measured on every value. Where the public data doesn't exist, we'd rather tell you than fill the gap with a guess — and Belgium is one of those cases.

The figure on our other country pages comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of what governments are doing about the worst forms of child labour, and that review covers the 131 countries which hold trade preferences with the United States. Belgium is not one of them, so it is never assessed. The obvious alternative doesn't help either: the ILO and UNICEF's global estimates, published in June 2025, are built on household surveys in 107 countries and leave out Europe and Northern America entirely — in their own words, "because of data limitations".

That absence is not the same as zero. The ILO's regional estimate puts around 2.3 million children aged 5 to 17 in child labour across Europe and Northern America, against under 1 per cent of children in high-income countries as a group. No national figure is published inside that. So the honest summary is that the record here is probably good and definitely unmeasured.