This is the one that surprises people. Sweden was the first country in the world to let people change their legal gender (1972), it opened marriage to same-sex couples in 2009, and in everyday life it is among the most accepting places anywhere for gay, lesbian and bi people — it also sits at the very top of ILGA-Europe's family-rights ranking, one of the few countries that fully recognises trans parenthood. Yet in the 2026 Rainbow Map it scores 68% and sits 9th in Europe: solidly upper-tier, but no longer at the front where its reputation would put it. The gap isn't hostility — Sweden actually moved up three places this year — it's that parts of the law haven't kept pace with the frontier. Its new legal-gender-recognition law (in force from 2025) simplified the process and dropped the medical-intervention requirement for people over 16, but it still stops short of full self-determination and continues to treat trans identity as a diagnosis. There is still no comprehensive ban on conversion practices, and, unlike Germany, Greece, Iceland, Malta, Portugal and Spain, Sweden has not yet banned medically unnecessary surgery on intersex children. ILGA measures law and policy, so a country that leads on daily acceptance can still sit mid-upper table when specific protections lag.

Sweden is a "full democracy" in the EIU Democracy Index 2024 (9.39), among the top three in the world, with competitive elections, an independent judiciary and a free, plural press protected by one of the oldest freedom-of-the-press laws anywhere (1766). The democratic framework and press freedom are among the strongest on earth.

Sweden scores strongly on women's rights whether measured by lived conditions (the Georgetown WPS Index: education, work, financial access, safety) or by formal legal rights (the World Bank's Women, Business and the Law index) — the two sources Fair Away now averages. Women are well represented across education, health, work and politics, and Sweden runs an explicitly feminist policy tradition. Abortion is legal on request up to 18 weeks.

Sweden ranks 4th of 143 in the WJP Rule of Law Index 2025 (0.85) — independent courts, real constraints on government power and very low corruption. This is one of the most dependable legal systems a visitor can be in.

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 Sweden 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. Sweden 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.