Turkey scores 3.3, up from a much lower figure on our previous source, and the reason for the difference is worth stating plainly because it is the single most important fact here: same-sex activity has never been criminalised in modern Turkey. That baseline is real and it separates Turkey from countries where being gay is itself an offence. Equaldex scores it 33 out of 100 (Legal Index 34, Public Opinion 33).

Almost everything built on top of that baseline is being actively dismantled. There is no partnership recognition of any kind. Changing legal gender is possible but still requires surgery. Istanbul Pride has been banned since 2015 and the ban is enforced: in June 2026 police detained at least 50 people, including a journalist, at an event that went ahead anyway. In the same month a court order had Instagram block the account of Kaos GL, one of the country's oldest LGBTI+ organisations and a news outlet, and more than 120 LGBTQI+ and feminist social media accounts were suspended. The government has designated both 2025 and 2026 as a "year of combating LGBT".

ILGA-Europe ranks Turkey 47th of 49 European countries and records an escalation over the past year: draft legislative amendments in progress, an adopted rollback of access to trans-specific healthcare, the dissolution of an LGBTI youth organisation, and a sharp rise in criminal lawsuits against activists. On this dimension the direction is not ambiguous.

The EIU rates Turkey a 'hybrid regime' at 4.26, joint 103rd of 167. Civil liberties is the weakest of its five components at 2.06 out of 10, and electoral process scores 3.50. Hundreds of journalists have been imprisoned. Independent media largely operates from exile.

Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul Convention on violence against women in 2021. Femicide rates are among the highest in Europe. The government's rhetoric emphasises women's roles as mothers. Abortion is legal on request up to 10 weeks, but rarely available in public hospitals.

Judicial independence in Turkey has been severely compromised following the 2016 coup attempt. 4,000 judges were dismissed and replaced. The court system serves executive interests.

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 Turkey 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. Turkey is not one of them, so it is never assessed. Household surveys do measure child labour in some countries outside that system, but they are run in different years with different questions, so a number taken from one of them would not mean the same thing as the tiered assessment used elsewhere on this site. We would rather show nothing than a number that isn't comparable.

For Turkey there is at least a national measurement to point at: the country's own labour force survey recorded 5.6 per cent of children aged 5 to 17 in economic activity in 2022, the figure reported to the UN under Sustainable Development Goal indicator 8.7.1. It is a real number, but it measures how many children work rather than what the state is doing about it, so we show it here as context rather than as a score.