Czechia has moved further and faster on this dimension than any other country on Fair Away over the last two years, further than its reputation abroad suggests — so it is worth being clear about what changed.

Two concrete legal wins. A registered-partnership upgrade in force since January 2025 gives same-sex couples nearly all the rights of marriage, joint adoption being the main exception. And the sterilisation requirement for changing legal gender, struck down by the Constitutional Court, has now been removed in practice — legal gender markers can be changed without it. On ILGA-Europe's Rainbow Map, Czechia rose six places to 26th of 49 with 42%, up from 33% the year before. What is still missing: full marriage equality, joint adoption, and a comprehensive ban on conversion practices.

The more interesting number is underneath. Equaldex scores Czechia 72 out of 100, split into a Legal Index of 80 and a Public Opinion Index of 64 — and that opinion figure is higher than Germany's, Portugal's, Belgium's or France's. Czech society has been among the more accepting in Europe for years; what changed recently is that the law started catching up with it, rather than the other way round.

Czechia is a full democracy — the EIU upgraded it to that top tier in its 2024 Index (score 8.08) — with strong institutions and, on paper, one of the freest press environments in the world (RSF ranks it 10th of 180 in 2025). One development worth knowing as background: after the October 2025 election, a government led by Andrej Babiš — a businessman who owns one of the country's largest media groups — took office in December 2025. Reporters Without Borders has since documented political attacks on the media and plans to change how public broadcasters are funded, which press-freedom groups warn could weaken their independence.

Czechia sits among the lowest in the EU on the WEF Global Gender Gap Index (0.686, 102nd of 148 in 2025). The gap is driven by low political representation — women hold a small share of parliamentary and ministerial seats — and by a persistent gender pay gap of around 18%, one of the highest in the union. Czechia ratified the Istanbul Convention on preventing violence against women only recently. Abortion is legal on request up to 12 weeks and widely accessible.

Czechia has an independent judiciary and scores solidly on the WJP Rule of Law Index, ranking 20th of 143 countries in 2025. Its score slipped by less than 1% this year, in line with a wider rule-of-law recession across Europe; WJP noted some narrowing of civic space (freedoms of expression and assembly) while civil and criminal justice held up.

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 Czechia 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. Czechia 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.