This is the number most visitors do not expect. South Korea scores 46 on the Equaldex Equality Index — below Thailand, Taiwan, China, Japan, Vietnam and India, several of which are poorer, less democratic, or both. The reason is not that being gay is a crime here. For civilians it never has been. The reason is that almost nothing has been built on top of that. There is no anti-discrimination act, despite bills being introduced and dropped for roughly twenty years. There is no marriage and no partnership. And Article 92-6 of the Military Criminal Act still criminalises sex between male soldiers, with up to two years' imprisonment — in a country where military service is compulsory for men, so the provision reaches most Korean men at some point in their twenties.

There is real movement in the courts. In July 2024 the Supreme Court ruled that the national health insurer could not refuse to register a man as his male partner's dependant — the first time Korea's highest court recognised a same-sex couple in law. And the split inside the score is worth reading: a Legal Index of 54 against a Public Opinion Index of 39. That runs the opposite way to most of Asia, where the public is ahead of the statute book. Here the law is ahead of the public. The organised resistance is not the state so much as a well-funded conservative Protestant lobby, which is why the Seoul Queer Culture Festival — held on 13 June 2026, one of the largest Pride events in Asia — was again refused the use of Seoul Plaza and marched through the surrounding streets instead. Suppression at the level of the permit desk, not the police cell.

On 3 December 2024 the president declared martial law and sent soldiers to the National Assembly. Lawmakers climbed the fences, reached the chamber, and voted it down within about six hours. He was impeached, removed by the Constitutional Court, and an election followed. The EIU's 2024 index registers the shock: 7.75, 32nd of 167, down ten places, and out of the "full democracy" band it had held.

It would be easy to file that as a country sliding towards authoritarianism. The rest of the evidence says something closer to the opposite. The institutions did what they exist to do, at speed, and press freedom then jumped rather than fell — Reporters Without Borders places Korea 47th of 180 in 2026 at 69.12 points, up 5.06, one of the largest single-year gains anywhere in that index. The durable weakness is older and duller than the coup attempt: criminal defamation. Under Article 307 of the Criminal Act a statement can be prosecuted even when it is true, if it damages someone's reputation and the court is not persuaded it served the public interest. That is a standing lever against journalists, and it long predates the crisis.

Our two sources agree about Korea, which is unusual: the Georgetown WPS Index puts lived conditions at 0.815 and the World Bank's legal frameworks score sits at 85.6. Education, health, safety and formal legal equality are all genuinely strong. What neither index measures is where Korea's reputation actually comes from — the gender pay gap is the widest in the OECD at close to thirty percent, and the share of women in senior management is among the lowest in the rich world. A high score here means the floor is solid, not that the ceiling is.

On reproductive rights the position is unusual enough to state plainly. The Constitutional Court struck down the criminal ban on abortion in 2019, and it lapsed at the end of 2020. The National Assembly has never passed the replacement law. So abortion in Korea is not a crime and not regulated either: no statutory gestational limits, no national insurance coverage, no clear obligation on hospitals, and availability that varies by city and by clinic. Legal, in other words, but not provided for.

The World Justice Project puts South Korea at 0.74 in 2025 — 19th of 143 globally and 5th of 15 in East Asia and the Pacific, and one of the minority of countries whose score rose rather than fell in a year when 68% declined. Courts are the strength: civil justice ranks 13th in the world and criminal justice 15th. The weakest factor is absence of corruption at 35th, which is the long shadow of a run of prosecuted presidents and chaebol executives. WJP does record two declines for Korea in this edition — freedom of assembly and association, and civil justice — and notes that the integrity of checks and balances was seriously weakened here, which is the martial-law episode showing up in the data.

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 South Korea is one of those cases. So instead of a figure that would look precise without being it, here is as honest a summary as we can give of what is actually known.

The number 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. That review covers the 131 countries that hold trade preferences with the United States, and South Korea is not one of them, so it is not assessed at all. A number invented in its place would not mean the same thing as Thailand's or Indonesia's, which is exactly what would make comparing them useless.

South Korea does appear on the same department's other list, of goods rather than governments — and it appears there for a reason worth understanding. It was added in 2024 for indium, a metal used in touchscreens and flat panels. The listing is not about children working in Korean factories. It is about where the input comes from: indium is refined from zinc, and the zinc in question is mined in Bolivia with child labour. This is a category the department only began publishing in 2024, tracing tainted inputs into the finished goods of wealthy countries. The Netherlands was added in the same round, for the same kind of reason.