Cyprus scores 51 on the Equaldex Equality Index, from a Legal Index of 66 and a Public Opinion Index of 36. The specialist European audit is harsher: ILGA-Europe's Rainbow Map 2026 puts Cyprus at 33.69%, 30th of 49 countries and well under the EU average of 52.10%.*

The shape inside that figure is the useful part. Civil partnerships have been available since 2015 and same-sex conduct has been legal since 1998, so a couple is not illegal here — but marriage, joint adoption and much of the rest of recognition are absent, and the Rainbow Map scores Cyprus 19% on equality and non-discrimination and 33% on family rights. One category scores 100%: civil society space.* Read those two together and you have the country: organising is free, protection is thin.

Gender recognition shows the same pattern in miniature. The Interior Ministry told parliament in November 2025 that 51 people in Cyprus have changed the gender marker and name on their ID since 2021 — the whole caseload, over five years.* In the same month two MPs tabled an amendment that would define "woman" and "gender" in law for the first time, which human rights groups warned could push trans women out of the protections they currently have under domestic violence legislation.*

The Public Opinion score of 36 has a street-level version, and it runs in both directions in the same year. In April an "LGBT" sign was put on a traditional Easter bonfire at a church in Limassol, in the spot normally reserved for the effigy of Judas.* In May a group dressed in black broke up a pre-Pride gathering, chanting homophobic slogans and carrying double-headed eagle and Enosis flags — the iconography of union with Greece, which matters for the democracy section below.* And in September the fourth annual United by Pride sent two marches from opposite sides of the divided capital to meet in the middle for a joint celebration, which the organisers called "a beacon of hope".* Police recorded 14 anti-LGBTI incidents in 2022 and 17 in 2023.*

The EIU scores Cyprus 7.38, 40th of 167 and a "flawed democracy". The spread is the interesting part: electoral process 9.17 and civil liberties 8.82 against functioning of government 5.36. Cyprus is not marked down for how it votes or for what you may say. It is marked down for what the state does between elections.

That score comes from the EIU's 2024 edition, which closed before the election that changed the parliament. On 24 May 2026 ELAM took 10.9% of the vote and eight seats, moving into third place in what Euronews called a historic breakthrough.* ELAM was founded in 2008 by Christos Christou, who had "served for many years at the side of Nicos Michaloliakos", the leader of Greece's Golden Dawn; it first tried to register as "Golden Dawn, Cyprus Branch", was refused, and became a legal party in 2011. openDemocracy describes it as ultra-nationalist and far right, and notes that in its early years it was "only known for its members' violent street attacks".* None of that is in the 7.38, and an index published annually could not have put it there.

Press freedom is the half of this dimension the EIU measures only partly, and here the two sources disagree sharply. RSF puts Cyprus 80th of 180 in 2026 on 56.91, down from 77th and 59.04 in 2025 — the second-lowest in the European Union.* Its account of why is structural rather than dramatic: growing media concentration and opaque ownership, two of the four largest newspapers affiliated with political parties, owners with other business interests and direct political roles, and private media dependent on state subsidies allocated non-transparently.*

One line in that profile explains more about Cyprus than any score on this page. RSF records that the Cyprus issue is a taboo subject, and that journalists who question the official line on it are often labelled "traitors".* A country can hold free elections, keep working courts and still have one conversation it cannot have in public. That is the thing a visitor is least likely to notice and most likely to be standing in the middle of.

This is the highest score on the page, and it is an average of two halves that do not agree. Lived conditions put Cyprus 52nd of 181 on the Georgetown WPS Index; the World Bank's Legal Frameworks score is 88.35, with mobility, work, marriage, parenthood and assets each at a full 100 out of 100. The law is close to complete.

The same World Bank release publishes a second pillar asking whether anything exists to put that law into effect — budgets, agencies, complaint routes, data. Cyprus scores 58.73 there against 88.35 on the law itself, with assets at 12.5 and parenthood at 25. Its expert-opinion score for safety is 46.88, where the legal framework for safety scores 81.25. Same publisher, same edition, same spreadsheet as the 8.3 above.

What that gap looked like in practice is a matter of public record. Between 2016 and 2019 an army officer killed seven people — five women, all migrant domestic workers, and two of their daughters. The disappearances had been reported to police over several years and were not treated seriously. The justice minister resigned, the police chief was dismissed, and the president said police had acted "negligently, wrongly and unprofessionally". A Cypriot engineer, Maria Mapporidou, organised the protests that forced it into the open, and compiled a list of 32 other missing foreign women.* A legal framework scoring 88 out of 100 was in force throughout.

One right sits outside the score, as on every Fair Away page, because neither source measures it. Abortion has been legal on request up to twelve weeks since a 2018 amendment, to nineteen weeks in cases of rape, abuse or incest, and without a time limit where there is serious risk to health. Access is a separate question: the public health system covers termination only where it is medically necessary, so an elective abortion is paid out of pocket at roughly €600–800 surgically or €100–120 medically, and doctors may refuse on moral grounds.*

Cyprus scores 0.67 in the World Justice Project's 2025 Index, 30th of 143 countries, up 0.3% and one rank place on the year before. That is the upper third of the world and the lower half of the EU — a normal, functioning legal system with one well-documented hole in it.

The hole has a name and an inquiry. Cyprus sold citizenship to investors until 2020, when the scheme was scrapped after Al Jazeera filmed a former speaker of parliament and others apparently offering to help a fictitious applicant with a criminal record obtain a passport. A board of inquiry chaired by Myron Nicolatos, until 2020 the president of the Supreme Court, then examined 2,478 passports issued between 2007 and 2016 plus 417 high-risk cases up to 2020, and found that 51.81% of them were illegal naturalisations.* More than half of a decade of one state's naturalisations, found unlawful by its own former chief justice.

Put that beside the press-freedom finding above and you have the mechanism rather than two facts. The scheme was not stopped by a Cypriot inspectorate, a Cypriot court or a Cypriot newspaper. It was stopped by a foreign broadcaster with a hidden camera, in a country where RSF records that media owners hold other business interests and direct political roles.

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 Cyprus 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. Cyprus is not one of them, so it is never assessed. The obvious alternative doesn't help either: the ILO and UNICEF's global estimates are built on household surveys and leave out Europe and Northern America entirely — in their own words, "because of data limitations".

That absence is not the same as zero, and on a divided island it is less reassuring than usual: whatever is or is not happening north of the line sits outside EU labour law as well as outside this index.