Iceland ranks third in Europe on the ILGA Rainbow Europe index (2026, 86%). Legal protections for LGBTQ+ people are strong and broadly enforced, and civil society is active and well established. A few legal gaps remain, but the overall picture is very positive.

Iceland ranks among the world's strongest democracies — 4th globally on the EIU Democracy Index (2024) — with a free press, robust institutions and a perfect score on electoral process.

Iceland has topped the WEF Global Gender Gap Index for over fifteen years — the most gender-equal country measured, and the only one to have closed more than 90% of its gap. Participation, education, health and political representation are all exceptionally strong. Abortion is legal on request up to 22 weeks.

Iceland has a strong, independent legal system. It is not ranked by the WJP Rule of Law Index, so this score is estimated from the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators (Rule of Law) and lined up with the WJP scale using the 139 countries that appear in both — see the note in Sources below. That's why it carries a ~.

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 Iceland 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. Iceland 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.