Romania scores 46 on the Equaldex Equality Index, and the halves pull apart: a Legal Index of 60 against a Public Opinion Index of 33. The specialist European audit reads the law far more harshly. ILGA-Europe's Rainbow Map 2026 puts Romania at 19% — the lowest of the twenty-seven EU member states, below Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary, and unchanged on its 2025 score.

Both are measuring honestly, and the gap between them is the most useful thing on this page. Equaldex credits what exists: same-sex conduct was decriminalised in 2001, the age of consent is equal, gender-affirming care is legal, and anti-discrimination law covering sexual orientation has been on the books since the EU accession process. ILGA asks a different question — protection by protection, recognition by recognition — and Romania fails nearly all of it. The statute book is largely complete on not being treated worse and entirely empty on being recognised at all.

That emptiness has a court judgment attached to it. On 23 May 2023, in Buhuceanu and Ciobotaru and 20 other families v. Romania, the European Court of Human Rights found that the absence of any legal recognition for same-sex couples breaches Article 8 of the Convention. Three years on, ILGA-Europe's 2026 review records that no legislative initiative has been adopted.* In December 2025 the Constitutional Court took up a narrower version of the same question: whether a same-sex spouse can be a co-insured person in the public health insurance system.*

The Public Opinion score of 33 has a visible shape too, and it is municipal rather than national. In June 2025 Bucharest Pride marked its twentieth anniversary with a full Pride Month and roughly 31,000 marchers; counter-protesters assembled beforehand and the authorities defused it quickly. Cluj-Napoca, Brașov, Timișoara and Iași all held marches without incident. In Oradea the municipality tried to block Pride for the third year running, nine organisers and participants were fined afterwards, and ACCEPT and the local group Ark Oradea have taken the city to the European Court of Human Rights over it — with forty-seven organisations publicly backing them.* One national score of 4.6 covers both of those.

The EIU scores Romania 5.99, 72nd of 167. That is a hair below its threshold for a flawed democracy, and the hair matters: it puts Romania in the hybrid-regime band, alone among EU member states. Our one-decimal scale rounds it to 6.0, which sits exactly on the EIU's own boundary — so read the 6.0 as the published 5.99, and the classification as the EIU's rather than ours.

The spread inside the number tells you more than the number. Electoral process scores 8.25 and civil liberties 7.06; functioning of government scores 5.36 and political culture 3.75. Romania is not marked down for how it votes or for what its citizens are allowed to say. It is marked down for what happens between elections, and for how little of the public believes any of it works.

Press freedom is the part that has improved, and RSF's own breakdown shows where it hasn't. Romania's security indicator stands at 89.76 and its legal indicator at 70.50, against an economic indicator of 46.06 — 65th in the world. RSF describes the mechanism: media funding that is "often opaque, even corrupt", and "the widespread practice of diverting public funds to the media, in a non-transparent manner", which "distorts the market and undermines the media's watchdog function".* It also records prosecutors' interference with journalists' work that "amounts to harassment", a justice system increasingly pushing reporters to reveal sources, and a growing number of SLAPP suits.*

One named case carries the point further than the indicators do. RSF cites the harassment and smear campaign against the reporter Emilia Șercan, in which the authorities "not only failed to render justice but they were also suspected of being complicit".*

This is the highest score on the page and the one most likely to mislead you. It averages lived conditions, where Romania ranks 43rd of 181, with the World Bank's Legal Frameworks score of 90.7 — and that legal half is law on paper. Seven of the World Bank's ten topics score a full 100 out of 100.

The same World Bank release publishes a second pillar, Supportive Frameworks, which asks whether anything exists to put that law into effect: budgets, agencies, complaint routes, data. Romania scores 60 there against 90.7 on the law itself. The expert-opinion pillar puts safety at 40.63, where the legal framework for safety scores 68.75. Both of those figures come from the same publisher, the same edition and the same spreadsheet as the 8.5 above.

Romania's own police numbers say the same thing in a plainer way. In 2025 officers attended more than 138,000 domestic violence incidents, identified 29,652 cases as carrying imminent risk, and issued 15,856 provisional protection orders, with a further 15,680 orders issued by the courts.*

One right sits outside the score, as it does on every Fair Away page, because neither source measures it. Abortion is legal on request up to fourteen weeks. Getting one is a different matter: Human Rights Watch records that public hospitals increasingly refuse, that doctors invoke conscientious objection with no legal obligation to refer the patient anywhere else, that on-request abortion is excluded from national health insurance cover, and that the state has not funded free contraception since 2013.* Romania's adolescent pregnancy rate is among the highest in the European Union.*

Romania scores 0.61 in the World Justice Project's 2025 Index, 44th of 143 countries, down 1.2% and two rank places on the year before. Within its own region it ranks 27th of the 31 countries the WJP groups as the EU, EFTA and North America, and 41st of 51 high-income countries.*

The fall is real and it is also ordinary: 68% of all countries declined in the 2025 Index, the worst year the WJP has recorded.* What is worth noticing is who is making the running on it. The best-known account of how Romania's judicial reforms were hollowed out is Captured justice, a documentary by the reader-funded newsroom Recorder rather than by a commission or an inspectorate — and it was made in a country where, on the same page of RSF's index, prosecutors are pressing journalists to give up their sources. Those two facts belong together.

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 Romania 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. Romania 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.