Georgia is an unusual case: its Equaldex Equality Index score of 31/100 is built from a Legal Index of 50 and a Public Opinion Index of just 13 — law running well ahead of attitudes, the reverse of the pattern on most Fair Away pages. Homosexuality has been legal since 2000, an anti-discrimination law covering sexual orientation and gender identity has been in force since 2014, and the age of consent is equal. But there is no marriage or partnership for same-sex couples — the Civil Code defines marriage as a union of a man and a woman — and no joint adoption.

That legal floor got worse, not just static. Parliament's "Law on Family Values and Protection of Minors" bans Pride events and rainbow flags, bans gender-affirming care, bans legal gender recognition outright, and explicitly bars same-sex couples and individuals from adopting; the president refused to sign it, so it took effect by parliamentary override in October 2024. In April 2025, lawmakers went further and removed "gender identity" as a protected ground from the country's hate-crime law, leaving only sexual orientation. The fall showed up sharply in ILGA-Europe's Rainbow Map 2025, released that May: Georgia dropped seven places to 44th of 49 European countries at 12%, one of the steepest single-year drops on the continent that year alongside the UK and Hungary, and its lowest score and ranking in the index's history.* The 2026 edition shows no further movement — Georgia is still at 44th and 12%, the floor it fell to the year before.

The law's real-world stakes showed up directly in 2024–25. Trans woman Kesaria Abramidze was murdered in 2024; her killer, Beka Jaiani, was convicted of premeditated murder "with particular cruelty," with the motive determined to be her gender identity, and his life sentence was upheld on appeal in July 2025. It was the last case in which "gender identity" was recognised as a hate-crime motive in Georgia — the same year lawmakers struck it from the law.* Tbilisi Pride, the organisation behind the country's Pride movement since 2019, reported that it was "compelled in 2025 to largely suspend its activities, close its office, and relocate staff," citing the inability to organise Pride Week safely.* Even the Equality Movement's own website now greets a visitor with an 18+ age check, citing "homophobic censorship" directly on the page — a small, concrete sign of what the law does to an organisation's everyday operation.*

The EIU rates Georgia a "hybrid regime" at 4.70 in 2024 — 94th of 167, down five places on 2023. The October 2024 parliamentary election is the reason the number is moving the wrong way: the ruling Georgian Dream party claimed roughly 54% of the vote, and the European Parliament responded with a resolution rejecting the results over "significant irregularities," calling for a new vote within a year under international supervision and for sanctions on senior officials. Independent Georgian election monitors said separately that they had documented "a complex, large-scale electoral fraud scheme" favouring the ruling party.*

Parliament then used a 2017 constitutional change — which replaced direct presidential elections with a vote by a 300-member electoral college — to install Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former Manchester City striker turned hardline anti-Western politician, as president after the opposition boycotted the vote. Georgian Dream's honorary chairman, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, called him "the embodiment of a Georgian man."* Days later, the government announced it would not pursue EU accession talks until 2028 — even though EU membership is written into Georgia's constitution — in response to the European Parliament's resolution.

Press freedom moved just as fast. RSF ranks Georgia 135th of 180 in its 2026 index (score 40.77), down 21 places from 114th (50.53) the year before — one of the steepest single-year drops the index records — pointing to a tightened "foreign influence" law that imposes criminal liability on media directors and board members, new bans on foreign funding for broadcasters, and roughly 600 documented attacks on the press in a single year.*

Georgia's strongest dimension, blending the Georgetown WPS Index 2025 (0.798, lived conditions) with the World Bank WBL 2026 Legal Frameworks score (76.68, formal legal rights). The legal half is close to fully equal on paper: marriage and property/asset law both score a full 100/100, as does the law around mobility and childcare. The weaker corners are pension law (37.5/100) and the legal framework around entrepreneurship (50/100) — narrower, more technical gaps than the ones driving the other four dimensions on this page.

The lived-conditions half is more middling: women hold about 22% of parliamentary seats, and 79% of women report feeling safe walking alone at night in their community — both mid-table by European standards. One WPS sub-indicator is worth a second look: Georgia's "son bias" measure, a proxy for sex-selective abortion built from the sex ratio at birth, sits at 106.6, still mildly above the natural baseline of roughly 105. That's an improvement on the 2000s, when researchers recorded a sex ratio as skewed as 121 boys per 100 girls in parts of Georgia — one of the most imbalanced ratios documented anywhere at the time.*

Georgia ranks 52nd of 143 countries in the WJP Rule of Law Index 2025 (0.58) — and 1st of 15 in its own Eastern Europe & Central Asia region, ahead of Montenegro and Kosovo, with Russia near the bottom of the same region at 119th. Its strongest sub-factors are genuinely rare in this part of the world: 1st regionally on absence of corruption and 1st regionally on open government. Its weakest are constraints on government power (86th globally) and civil justice (74th).

The direction matters as much as the level. Georgia's score fell 2.4% this year, part of what WJP itself calls an accelerating global "rule of law recession" — and in Georgia's case that decline tracks a concrete squeeze on the country's own watchdogs. In September 2024 the government's Anti-Corruption Bureau classified Transparency International Georgia and its director as an "electoral subject," subjecting the country's leading anti-corruption group to the financial-scrutiny regime built for political parties; TI Georgia called the decision "unlawful" and aimed at "persecuting an election observer group." Two of the country's other leading legal-rights watchdogs, GYLA and ISFED, jointly condemned the move as an "arbitrary" precedent for restricting civic activism.*

The US Department of Labor rates Georgia at "Moderate Advancement" (2024), the second of four tiers. Real progress is documented: a National Action Plan on the Protection of Human Rights that widens children's access to education, a new National Action Plan on Trafficking in Persons drafted for 2025–2026, and improved education access — plus a dedicated teacher-training programme — for children with disabilities.

Two legal gaps stand out. Georgia's minimum working-age law does not apply to children working in the informal sector, and its Criminal Code does not explicitly prohibit using children in illicit activities. ILAB also judges the country's social programmes insufficient to address the full scope of the problem, including children working on the streets.