This is the one that surprises people. The Netherlands was the first country in the world to open marriage to same-sex couples (2001) and is still, in everyday life, among the most accepting places anywhere for gay, lesbian and bi people. Yet in ILGA-Europe's 2026 Rainbow Map it sits at 64% — 13th in Europe, in the middle of the pack rather than at the top where its reputation would put it. The reason isn't that the country turned hostile; it's that the frontier moved and the Netherlands largely stood still. Progress on the law has stalled: the bill that would let people change their registered gender by self-determination has been stuck since 2021, there is still no ban on medically unnecessary surgery on intersex children (a handful of European countries now have one), and anti-discrimination and hate-crime protections have gaps that higher-scoring countries have closed. Meanwhile other European countries — Malta, Belgium, Iceland — kept legislating and pulled ahead. ILGA measures laws and policies, so a country that rests on past achievements slides down even without anything getting worse.

The Netherlands is a "full democracy" in the EIU Democracy Index 2024 (9.00), with competitive elections, an independent judiciary and a free, plural press. Politics has been turbulent — the 2023 election reshaped the party landscape and coalition-building is slow — but the democratic framework and press freedom remain among the strongest in the world.

The Netherlands scores strongly on women's rights, whether measured by lived conditions (the Georgetown WPS Index: education, work, financial access, safety) or by formal legal rights (the World Bank's Women, Business and the Law index) — the two sources Fair Away now averages. Women are well represented across education, health, work and politics. Abortion is legal on request up to 24 weeks.

The Netherlands ranks 9th of 143 in the WJP Rule of Law Index 2025 (0.82) — independent courts, real constraints on government power and low corruption, with civil-justice delays the main soft spot. This is one of the more dependable legal systems a visitor can be in.

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 the Netherlands is one of those cases.

Here is why there isn't one. 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. The Netherlands 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 and built on household surveys in 107 countries, leave out Europe and Northern America entirely — in their own words, "because of data limitations". European countries largely do not run the surveys that would measure this about themselves.

That absence is not the same as zero. The ILO's own regional estimate puts around 2.3 million children aged 5 to 17 in child labour across Europe and Northern America, roughly 1.8 per cent, against under 1 per cent in high-income countries as a group. Nobody publishes a Dutch figure inside that. What the Netherlands does have is a law it never used: the Child Labour Due Diligence Act, passed by the Senate in May 2019, never brought into force, and now set to be withdrawn as part of the bill implementing the European due diligence directive.

So the honest summary is that the Dutch record here is probably good and definitely unmeasured — and if you think a country should be able to answer this question about itself, the people to ask are national statistics offices and Eurostat, not the travel industry.