Equaldex scores Jordan 15/100, and the two halves of that score point in opposite directions. The Legal Index is 24 — higher than Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia or Indonesia — because same-sex conduct between adults has not been a crime in Jordan since 1951. The Public Opinion Index is 6. That is the lowest public-opinion figure of any country on Fair Away, by a distance; the next lowest is Indonesia at 11.

So the usual Fair Away pattern is reversed here. On most low-scoring countries the public runs ahead of the law and the state is the brake. In Jordan the law mostly leaves people alone and society does not. Human Rights Watch puts it plainly: Jordanian law does not explicitly criminalise same-sex relations, but vague "immorality" provisions can be used to target LGBT people, and there is no protection against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity.*

The state has moved against organising rather than against private life. Human Rights Watch documented in December 2023 that security forces systematically targeted LGBT rights activists with interrogations, threats and online smear campaigns, forcing several organisations to shut down and pushing some activists out of the country.* The 2023 cybercrime law gave that a legal instrument: vague offences including "promoting, instigating, aiding or inciting immorality" now carry at least three months in jail and fines of 5,000–20,000 Jordanian dinars.* My.Kali, the Arabic and English queer magazine founded in Amman in 2007, has been blocked inside Jordan since 2016.*

The EIU puts Jordan at 3.28 in 2024 — 115th of 167, in the "authoritarian regime" band, with a political-culture component of 2.50 and functioning of government at 2.86. Parliament is elected; it is not where power sits. The king appoints the prime minister and cabinet, appoints the whole Senate, can dissolve the lower house, and retains final authority over legislation. Political parties were legalised again in 2022 and the 2024 election ran on a new law meant to strengthen them — a real change worth noting, but one that altered who fills the seats rather than what the seats can decide. In April 2025 the authorities banned the Muslim Brotherhood organisation outright, while its political party kept its seats.*

The 2023 cybercrime law is where this becomes measurable. Jordan's own National Centre for Human Rights recorded 3,170 prosecutions under it in 2024, the vast majority for online defamation.* In January 2025 the State Security Court sentenced Ayman Sandouka, secretary of a since-dissolved political party, to five years for "incitement to oppose the political regime" over a Facebook post addressed to the king.* In May 2025 the media regulator blocked twelve news websites — among them Middle East Eye and Raseef22 — over reporting on Jordanian aid deliveries to Gaza.*

RSF ranks Jordan 142nd of 180 in the 2026 Index (score 39.33, up from 147th and 35.25 a year earlier), with its legal-environment sub-score the weakest component at 154th.* Read those two things together: the ranking improved while the prosecutions and blockings continued. The rank is the less informative of the two.

This is the score on this page most likely to mislead, so it is worth opening up. The 6.1 is a 50/50 blend of lived conditions (Georgetown WPS Index 0.686, 88th of 177) and formal legal rights (World Bank WBL Legal Frameworks, 52.5). Inside that WBL half Jordan scores 100 on Pay and 100 on Childcare — and 0 on Marriage, 6.25 on Safety and 12.5 on Mobility. A composite that averages a perfect score and a zero produces a middling number describing neither.

What those zeroes stand for is concrete, and Human Rights Watch sets it out: a woman under 30 needs her male guardian's permission to marry for the first time; a woman can lose spousal maintenance for "disobeying" her husband or leaving the marital home without "legitimate" reason; women have been detained on the complaint of a male guardian, some for more than a decade; and a woman cannot travel abroad with her children without her guardian's approval.* Jordanian law does not recognise marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man. And a Jordanian woman married to a foreigner cannot pass her nationality to her children or her spouse — leaving those children paying for schooling that is free to citizens.* The state defends that last one as protecting the Palestinian right of return, which tells you it is a political question rather than an administrative one.

Against that: Article 308, the provision that let a rapist escape prosecution by marrying his victim, was repealed in 2017. Women's labour-force participation and political representation have both been rising, quota seats exist in parliament and municipal councils, and the WBL legal score itself moved up between the 2024 and 2026 editions on amendments covering women's employment and parental leave. The direction of travel in law is forward; the distance still to go is what the Marriage and Mobility zeroes measure.

The World Justice Project puts Jordan at 0.55 in 2025 — 62nd of 143, third in the Middle East and North Africa after Qatar and Kuwait, and up 0.6% on the year with its rank unchanged. For the region that is a comparatively strong result, and it reflects something real: courts function, contracts are enforceable, and public order holds.

What holds the score down is a second system running alongside the first. Under the 1954 Crime Prevention Law, provincial governors — who answer to the Interior Ministry, not to a court — can order someone held in administrative detention for up to a year, bypassing the Criminal Procedure Law entirely. No charge, no trial, no independent review. Jordan's National Centre for Human Rights recorded 20,437 administrative detentions in 2024, a significant fall from the 37,395 recorded in 2022.* The fall is real and worth saying out loud. Twenty thousand people a year detained by administrative order, in a country of around eleven million, is still the clearest single reason a "safe and stable" reputation and a mid-table rule-of-law score can both be accurate at once.

There is movement. In April 2025 the cabinet approved penal-code amendments expanding non-custodial sentences — community service, rehabilitation, electronic monitoring — and both chambers took them forward, though the NCHR notes courts have so far made very limited use of the alternatives that already exist.*

The US Department of Labor places Jordan in the Moderate Advancement tier for 2024, the second of four, one of 63 countries in that band.* ILAB publishes a tier, not a score, so the 6.0 is our approximation of that tier rather than a figure you can look up — which is what the tilde on the bar means.

ILAB records children working in agriculture, in vehicle repair and other trades, in street work and in forced begging. The risk concentrates among the children least covered by the system: refugee and stateless children, and children of migrant workers. Jordan's own labour-rights organisation, Tamkeen, argued in June 2026 that the gap between the legislative framework and actual enforcement is what threatens child-labour protection here* — a useful corrective to reading "Moderate Advancement" as a description of conditions rather than of government effort.