Switzerland is the clearest case on this site of two sources disagreeing for a very specific, traceable reason. Equaldex scores it 70 out of 100 (Legal Index 76, Public Opinion 64); ILGA-Europe's Rainbow Map puts it at 50%, mid-table for Western Europe. Both are right about different halves of the picture.

Switzerland has done the two things that weigh most heavily: marriage has been open to same-sex couples since July 2022, carried by a national referendum in which 64% voted yes, and since January 2022 changing your legal gender has required nothing more than a declaration at the civil registry — no diagnosis, no surgery, no court. On that specific measure Switzerland is among the most straightforward countries in Europe.

What ILGA counts, and Switzerland largely lacks, is the protective framework around those wins. Sexual orientation was added to the anti-discrimination criminal law by referendum in 2020, but gender identity was not. There is no federal ban on conversion practices — a few cantons have acted on their own. There is no legal recognition of a non-binary gender and no protection for intersex children against medically unnecessary surgery. The federal structure means several of these questions sit with 26 cantons rather than with Bern, which makes national progress slow by design.

Worth noting about the referendum route: rights won at the ballot box carry a real popular mandate, which the Public Opinion figure of 64 reflects. It also means they arrive later than in parliamentary systems, and can in principle be challenged the same way.

Switzerland is one of the world's strongest democracies (EIU 9.32, 2024), built on direct-democratic referendums, robust press freedom and deep institutional trust.

Switzerland scores well on the WEF Global Gender Gap Index (0.785, 2024). Worth knowing as background: federal women's suffrage came late (1971, with one canton holding out until 1990), and gaps in pay and political representation remain — the large 2019 women's strike pushed equality back up the agenda. Abortion is legal on request up to 12 weeks.

Switzerland has an exceptionally strong, independent legal system. It is not ranked by the WJP Rule of Law Index, so this score is estimated from the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators (Rule of Law) and lined up with the WJP scale using the 139 countries that appear in both — see the note in Sources below. That's why it carries a ~.

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 Switzerland 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. Switzerland 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.