The Philippines scores 54 on the Equaldex Equality Index, which places it 7th of the 44 countries measured in Asia — ahead of Japan, India, Vietnam, South Korea and Singapore. Split the score and the picture sharpens: a Legal Index of 49 against a Public Opinion Index of 59. The public is ten points ahead of the law, and that is the single most useful thing to know about the country on this value.

Being gay has never been a crime here, and Filipino queer life is visible in a way it is not in most of the region — in comedy, in television, in the neighbourhood, and in a Pride march that has run since 1994 and was the first in Asia. What is missing is protection. A national anti-discrimination bill, the SOGIE Equality Bill, has been filed in every Congress since 2000 and has never passed; it has cleared one chamber and stalled in the other more than once. In its absence, the actual protection a person has depends on the city or province they are standing in: dozens of local governments have passed their own anti-discrimination ordinances, and many have not. There is no marriage or civil partnership, and no route to change legal gender — Equaldex records changing gender as illegal, which is unusual for a country scoring this well overall. In January 2026 the Supreme Court did rule that same-sex partners can be recognised as co-owners of property where both contributed to buying it, which is a real gain and also a good measure of how the ground moves here: case by case, not by statute.

The EIU puts the Philippines at 6.63 for 2024 — 51st of 167, a "flawed democracy", up two places. The interesting part is not the total but how unevenly it is made up. Electoral process scores 8.75 and political participation 8.33: Filipinos vote in enormous numbers and power does change hands. Functioning of government scores 4.64 and political culture 4.38, which is where dynastic politics, patronage and weak institutional follow-through show up. It is a country with strong elections and weak government, not the other way round.

Press freedom carries a warning about how to read an index. Reporters Without Borders ranks the Philippines 114th of 180 in 2026, up two places from 116th — while its actual score fell, from 49.57 to 46.79. The country did not improve; others declined faster. The weakest component is economic (131st): the pressure on Philippine journalism runs largely through ownership, advertising and the cost of defending a case, rather than through censorship of what may be printed. Reporters are killed here less often than in the worst years but the country remains one of the more dangerous places in Asia to do the job, and impunity for past killings is the long-running complaint.

Our two sources disagree here, and the disagreement is informative. The World Bank's legal frameworks score is 72.5 — the law, on paper, is reasonably equal, and the Philippines has long been a regional leader on women in senior professional and political roles. The Georgetown WPS Index, which measures lived conditions rather than statutes, puts the country at 0.607, 131st of 177. Security drags that down: the long conflict in Mindanao, high rates of intimate-partner violence, and community safety that women rate poorly.

Two things neither headline number shows, both of which matter more to a visitor than the average does. The World Bank scores the Marriage topic at 50 out of 100, and the reason is that the Philippines is the only country in the world apart from Vatican City where divorce is unavailable to most citizens. Filipino Muslims can divorce under the Code of Muslim Personal Laws; everyone else has annulment, which is slower, more expensive and requires proving that the marriage was never valid to begin with. Abortion is criminalised under the Revised Penal Code with no written exceptions, including for rape or for the life of the woman — in practice doctors treat life-threatening cases, but they do so without a statute protecting them, and post-abortion care is a documented point of stigma and refusal.

This is the lowest of the five, and the way it is put together says more than the number. The World Justice Project puts the Philippines at 0.46 for 2025 — 97th of 143, and 13th of the 15 countries it measures in East Asia and the Pacific. But the weakness is concentrated, not general. Constraints on government powers rank 85th and absence of corruption 84th; fundamental rights rank 118th and criminal justice 119th. Roughly thirty places separate how the state is checked from how people are actually treated by the justice system. That gap is the drug war, which killed somewhere between the government's own count of about 6,000 and credible estimates several times higher, and which was carried out through the police and the courts rather than around them.

What has changed is accountability, and it is worth being precise about it because the easy version in both directions is wrong. Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in Manila in March 2025 on an International Criminal Court warrant. On 23 April 2026 the ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber unanimously confirmed three counts of crimes against humanity — murder and attempted murder — and committed him to trial, which is scheduled to open on 30 November 2026. That is a former president of a country that withdrew from the ICC facing trial anyway. It is also, so far, one man in The Hague: the domestic convictions of police officers remain in single figures, and the institutions that produced the killings are the same institutions. The WJP score moved 0.4% in a year when 68% of countries declined — the Philippines improved mainly by standing still.

The US Department of Labor assessed the Philippines as making Moderate Advancement in 2024, the second of its four tiers. The number is our approximation of that tier, not a published score, which is why it carries a tilde. About 1.9% of children aged 5 to 14 work — some 459,000 children, mostly in agriculture and services — while 92.0% attend school. Sugarcane, gold mining, deep-sea fishing and pyrotechnics are the sectors the department names as hazardous.

The reason the Philippines sits at Moderate rather than higher is enforcement capacity: 1,210 labour inspectors for a workforce of around 47 million, no mechanism to assess civil penalties for child labour violations, and no published count of violations found. In 2024 the government created a Presidential Office for Child Protection and a child labour unit in the Bangsamoro region, which is why it did not fall further.

One part of this is directly connected to travel, and it is uncomfortable enough to state plainly rather than to imply. The department's assessment identifies online sexual abuse and exploitation of children as the country's most severe problem, driven by widespread English literacy, cheap connectivity and — in its own framing — high international demand, with children exploited on live streams paid for from abroad. It also records that girls from rural and disaster-affected areas are trafficked into urban centres and tourist destinations. This is not a story about Filipino families so much as about who is paying, and a large share of the paying happens outside the country.