Finland scores 76 of 100 on the Equaldex Equality Index, and the two halves of that number sit a long way apart: a Legal Index of 87 against a Public Opinion Index of 66.* The legal half is close to finished. Since 3 April 2023 a person can change their legal gender on their own written account of it: no diagnosis, no medical examination, no infertility requirement, with a thirty-day reflection period and an adults-only limit.*

The 66 is the half worth reading carefully, and it is a Nordic pattern rather than a Finnish one: Sweden's split is 85 and 65, New Zealand's 95 and 65. A score built that way describes a public that is broadly settled on rights and cooler on some of the cultural questions bundled in alongside them. ILGA-Europe, which audits law and policy only and ignores opinion entirely, puts Finland sixth of 49 European countries at 70%, against an EU average of 52%.*

Sixth of 167 in the EIU Democracy Index 2024, with a perfect 10.00 on electoral process. Press freedom is as strong: sixth of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders 2026 index, on a score of 86.22, with its highest mark of all on journalists' safety.*

One thing is moving. RSF notes that the public broadcaster Yle, overseen by a parliamentary council, is being reformed by the current government with significant budget cuts attached — in a country where politicians cannot appoint or dismiss its journalists and rarely try.*

Where things stand in October 2026: the governing coalition is the National Coalition Party with the Finns Party and the Christian Democrats, and in Yle's poll of 8 October the Finns Party reached 16.5% and passed the Prime Minister's own party for the first time this term.* None of that is in the 9.3, which reads a 2024 edition.

Fifth of 181 countries on the Georgetown WPS Index, which measures lived conditions — education, work, financial access, safety — and 87.5 out of 100 on the World Bank's legal-frameworks score, up from 85 a year earlier. Nine of the World Bank's ten legal topics score 75 or 100. The tenth, safety, scores 12.5.

That 12.5 is partly a measuring artefact and partly not, and both halves are worth knowing. The World Bank credits dedicated statutes, and Finland handles domestic violence through its Act on Restraining Orders and its general Criminal Code rather than through a standalone offence, so the boxes stay unticked. But the Council of Europe's monitoring body reached its own conclusion from the other direction: in its 2024 report on Finland it recorded a national survey in which 47% of women said they had experienced physical or sexual violence at least once since the age of 15, and called for a long-term national strategy, mandatory training for judges and police, and justice-system records that note the relationship between victim and perpetrator.* The same report credits Finland with redefining rape around consent from 1 January 2023.

Reproductive rights, which we report separately rather than folding into the number: abortion is available on request to the end of the twelfth week. Until a 2022 reform, passed by 125 votes to 41 on a citizens' initiative, it required supporting statements from two physicians.*

Third of 143 countries in the WJP Rule of Law Index 2025, behind Denmark and Norway. Courts are independent, corruption is rare, and a visitor who needs the legal system will find it works the way it says it does.

There is one place where that stops at the map's edge. Finland's Border Security Act, in force since 22 July 2024, lets border guards at the Russian frontier turn people away without assessing whether they have a claim to protection — the step international and EU law treat as the minimum. The government's case is that Russia is pushing migrants to the border deliberately, so this is an emergency measure; it was passed as temporary, extended to the end of 2026, and in September 2026 put to parliament again to run to the end of 2028.* It went through parliament as an exceptive law — the route Finland uses for an Act it accepts is substantively in breach of its own constitution — and the constitutional lawyer Milka Sormunen argued at the time that it would formally legalise pushbacks against a bar on refoulement and mass expulsion that no emergency permits a state to set aside.*

A rule-of-law score counts whether institutions function, and Finland's do. It does not count a right a parliament has voted to switch off at one border.

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 Finland 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, which covers the 131 countries holding trade preferences with the United States. Finland is not one of them, so it is never assessed. The ILO and UNICEF global estimates don't fill the gap either: they leave out Europe and Northern America for lack of comparable data.