Portugal punches above its weight on LGBTQ+ rights. Same-sex marriage has been legal since 2010 and adoption rights since 2016. Lisbon has become a major LGBTQ+ travel destination in recent years and the country scores on par with Northern Europe.

Portugal is rated a 'full democracy' by the EIU with excellent press freedom. Political institutions are stable and independent.

Portugal scores well on women's rights. Abortion is legal on request up to 10 weeks. Women are represented in government and the workforce at reasonable rates, though pay gaps persist.

Portugal has an independent, well-functioning legal system under EU law. It scores 0.67 on the WJP Rule of Law Index (29th of 143) — dependable in daily practice, though civil justice is slow and the score sits below the Western European leaders.

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 Portugal 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. Portugal 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.