Saudi Arabia has no written criminal code for personal conduct and relies on judicial interpretation of Sharia law, under which consensual same-sex activity can carry flogging, imprisonment, or death. Equaldex scores the country 13/100 — a Legal Index of just 5 and a Public Opinion Index of 22. That 17-point gap is unusually narrow: on most low-scoring countries public attitudes run well ahead of the law, but here even the surveyed public sits close to the legal floor. There is no anti-discrimination law, no legal gender recognition, and gender non-conformity in dress is a separate criminal offence.

Enforcement is real, not theoretical, and it has touched sexuality directly. In the April 2019 mass execution of 37 men — most of them Shia Saudis convicted after unfair, torture-tainted trials on protest-related and political charges — five were also convicted over consensual same-sex conduct.* The primary charges in that case were political and sectarian, not purely a purge of gay men — but the same-sex convictions were real, and were used as an added ground for execution. Saudi authorities have also documented risk of arrest for using dating and hookup apps linked to a real identity or location, a pattern reported across the region.*

The EIU puts Saudi Arabia at 2.08 in 2024 — 148th of 167, an "authoritarian regime". The electoral process component is 0.00, the floor of the index: there are no elections for head of state or national legislature, no political parties, and the Shura (Consultative) Council is fully appointed by the king. Even the country's only elected bodies, its municipal councils, hold limited power and fill roughly half their own seats by appointment. Mohammed bin Salman has been Crown Prince since 2017 and Prime Minister since 2022, a combination that concentrates day-to-day executive authority inside the monarchy itself.

Press freedom scores match: RSF ranks Saudi Arabia 176th of 180 in its 2026 index (score 19.11), down from 162nd (27.94) the year before — one of the steepest single-year drops RSF records, and its "legal framework" sub-score, at 177th, is the country's single worst component. On 14 June 2025 Saudi authorities executed journalist Turki al-Jasser, known for exposing corruption within the royal family — the first reporter killed by the kingdom since Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.* Ordinary social-media use carries real risk too: in 2021 Salma al-Shehab, a Leeds University doctoral student, was arrested during a family holiday in Saudi Arabia over old tweets and retweets supporting women's rights activists; an appeal court raised her original six-year sentence to 34 years in 2022, one of the longest ever handed to a peaceful activist, before international pressure brought it down to four years and she was released in early 2025.*

The blend of lived conditions (Georgetown WPS Index, 0.739) and formal legal rights (World Bank WBL Legal Frameworks, 56.23) lands at 6.5, and both halves reflect real, dated change. The ban on women driving ended on 24 June 2018. From August 2019, royal decrees let women over 21 obtain a passport and travel abroad without a male guardian's permission, and formally barred employment discrimination based on sex. Women now make up roughly a fifth of Shura Council seats and nearly half of the tourism workforce, up from about 5% in 2018.

The 2022 Personal Status Law shows the limit of that reform rather than its continuation: it was Saudi Arabia's first written family law, and it codifies — for the first time in writing — that only a male guardian can contract a woman's marriage, in a fixed order of male relatives, regardless of her age or prior marriages; her consent is required, but the law never defines what counts as consent.* The gap between legal reform and lived autonomy is clearest in one case: Loujain al-Hathloul was imprisoned in 2018 for campaigning for the right to drive that Saudi Arabia granted that same year, sentenced in December 2020 to nearly six years, and released in February 2021 with a travel ban due to expire on 12 November 2023. She has never been formally told why, but remains unable to leave the country — a Board of Grievances hearing in September 2024 closed her case for lack of jurisdiction without addressing it.*

Not every country is measured on every value, and this is the dimension where Saudi Arabia falls through. The World Justice Project, which supplies this score everywhere else on the site, does not cover Saudi Arabia. There is World Bank governance data that does — and it is exactly the wrong instrument for the question. It weighs contract enforcement, property rights and public order, all of which Saudi Arabia handles well, and it barely registers whether courts are independent of the ruler or whether a person can speak without being arrested. Run through it, the country lands mid-table, above Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and Brazil. We would rather leave the bar empty than publish a number that says the opposite of what this dimension is called.

Two things are documented, and no single figure can hold both. There has been real legal codification, aimed largely at making business predictable: a Civil Transactions Law in 2023, a Personal Status Law in 2022, and a Penal Code for Discretionary Crimes in 2016 have written down areas the courts previously decided through unwritten discretion.

And criminal justice runs the other way entirely. Saudi authorities executed at least 356 people in 2025 — a record for the second consecutive year, up from 345 in 2024 — and roughly 70% were foreign nationals, most convicted of non-lethal drug offences, including 98 people for hashish-related charges alone.* In 2025 Saudi Arabia also executed at least two men for crimes allegedly committed while they were children — Jalal al-Labbad, 15 at the time of his alleged offence, and Abdullah al-Derazi, 17 — both members of the country's Shia minority who rights monitors say were tortured in detention.* Confessions are frequently the only evidence presented at trial.

Not every country is measured on every value. Where the public data simply doesn't exist, we'd rather tell you than fill the gap with a guess — and Saudi Arabia is one of those cases. The figure on other Fair Away pages comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of government effort against the worst forms of child labour, which covers the 131 countries that hold trade preferences with the United States. Saudi Arabia is not one of them, so it isn't assessed at all.

Unlike several other unscored countries on this site, Saudi Arabia also doesn't appear on the same department's separate list of specific goods linked to child or forced labour — so there isn't even a goods-list flag to point to here. That makes this the most thinly documented of the five dimensions on this page: not a clean bill of health, simply unmeasured by any source we can cite.