Where Things Stand: LGBTQ+ Rights in the Balkans in 2026
The Balkans are changing fast — but unevenly. Montenegro has legal civil unions. Serbia blocks progress despite 80% public support. Kosovo's PM is pushing for change. Bosnia's Ministry of Health is actively obstructing a partnership bill. Here's the full picture.
We spend months every year in the Balkans — primarily Tirana, Albania, but also traveling through Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Montenegro. The region occupies a strange position in European LGBTQ+ discourse: too often dismissed as uniformly hostile, or too often romanticized as more progressive than it is.
The truth is more complex. Some countries are making real legal progress. Others are blocking it despite public opinion. And a significant anti-gender movement — well-organized and externally funded — is making noise across the region.
Here’s an honest country-by-country look at where things stand in early 2026.
Albania: Regional Leader, Significant Gaps
Albania surprises people. It has strong anti-discrimination protections — sexual orientation and gender identity have been protected categories in employment, education, and housing since 2010. The 2025 ILGA-Europe Rainbow Map ranked Albania 26th out of 49 European countries, ahead of many EU member states. Annual Tirana Pride has been running since 2012; the 2025 march, held on May 25 under the motto “Side by Side for Love,” drew hundreds of participants with visible support from EU diplomats.
What Albania doesn’t have: any legal recognition of same-sex couples. No civil unions, no registered partnerships, nothing.
Following the UN Universal Periodic Review in August 2024, Albania formally accepted recommendations to recognize same-sex unions and strengthen hate crime and hate speech protections. The government was expected to pass a civil union framework by end of 2025. It didn’t happen. Albania’s EU accession roadmap targets 2028 and explicitly requires adoption of a hate crimes/hate speech law in 2026 — so there is real external pressure for progress.
There’s a complication: the ruling Socialist Party recently removed terms like “diversity,” “intersectional discrimination,” and “gender stereotypes” from a new gender equality law, drawing criticism from civil society. And Albania’s constitution still does not mention sexual orientation and gender identity among protected grounds, despite 2022 amendments.
The situation: meaningful legal protections, visible queer community in Tirana, but a persistent gap between rhetoric and legal reality on partnership recognition.
Montenegro: The Balkans’ Legal Outlier
Montenegro is the most legally progressive country in the region — not by a small margin.
In July 2020, Montenegro’s parliament passed the Registered Life Partnerships Act with a lopsided 42-5 vote, making it the first country in the entire Balkans to legalize same-sex civil partnerships. The law provides inheritance rights, property rights, hospital and prison visitation rights, domestic violence protections, and guardianship rights. The first partnership was registered on July 25, 2021; by late 2023, 75 partnerships had been registered.
Same-sex marriage remains constitutionally banned, and adoption rights are not included. But the civil partnership law is real, functioning, and a regional benchmark.
The catch: social acceptance lags dramatically behind the law. A 2020 poll found 71% of Montenegrins considered homosexuality an “illness.” Montenegro is in EU accession negotiations targeting 2028, and the accession process has been the engine of legal reform here as elsewhere. Whether legal change produces cultural change is a slower story.
Serbia: Blocked Progress, Angry Streets
Serbia is the most politically complicated case in the region.
Belgrade has an active LGBTQ+ community and a well-established annual Pride Week. The 2025 march was the biggest ever, attracting significant numbers and explicitly linking LGBTQ+ rights to the broader pro-democracy movement that has swept Serbia following the Novi Sad train station disaster. Marchers condemned police violence against student protesters. The connection between LGBTQ+ rights and democratic governance isn’t accidental — in Serbia, they’re traveling the same road.
Meanwhile, the government is obstructing progress. President Vučić has stated that no same-sex partnership law will be adopted before his term ends in 2027, and has threatened to veto any such legislation. This despite a draft civil union bill introduced by opposition MPs in September 2024 — providing for inheritance, hospital visitation, pension and health rights — and despite public polling showing 73-80% of Serbs support some form of legal rights for same-sex couples.
There’s also open hostility outside Belgrade. In August 2025, a planned Pride event in Kruševac (southcentral Serbia) was effectively shut down when a mob of men with “life-threatening objects” threatened violence. Rather than protect the event, police banned it. LGBTQ+ organization “Da se zna!” received over 1,000 threats in the weeks surrounding the incident.
Serbia shows the gap between public sentiment, legal reality, and political will in sharp relief.
Bosnia and Herzegovina: Active Obstruction
Bosnia presents the most difficult picture in the region. Its complex governance structure — divided into the Federation and Republika Srpska — means LGBTQ+ rights progress exists in an uneven patchwork.
The Federal Ministry of Health has been actively blocking the appointment of an expert needed to draft a same-sex partnership law for the Federation. This obstruction has been ongoing since June 2023.
At the street level: The 6th BiH Pride March was held in Sarajevo on June 14, 2025, under the slogan “Love Rules.” No physical violence was reported at the march itself — progress. But massive waves of online hate followed, and two LGBTQ+ people were attacked afterward for wearing rainbow symbols.
The bright spots: a Sarajevo municipal court ruled in 2025 that refusing to broadcast promotional materials for an LGBTQ+ cultural event constituted discrimination. And 2025 saw the publication of “The History of Queer Life in Bosnia and Herzegovina” — the first book of its kind, tracing LGBTQ+ history from the Middle Ages through today.
This is the one country in the region where the trajectory feels clearly blocked rather than ambivalent.
Kosovo: The Unexpected Candidate for Progress
Kosovo is quietly one of the more interesting cases.
It’s one of the only Muslim-majority countries in the world that holds regular Pride parades (annual Pristina Pride Week since 2017). The constitution prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation.
More recently: Prime Minister Albin Kurti announced in April 2024 that the government intended to legalize civil unions as part of a new civil code, which would make Kosovo the second Balkans country after Montenegro to recognize same-sex relationships. Parliament hasn’t passed it yet — negotiations with opposition are ongoing — but the political will exists at the executive level, which is rare in the region. Only about 20% of Kosovars support same-sex unions (2023 survey), making Kurti’s position genuinely politically courageous.
North Macedonia: Slow Movement
North Macedonia has made progress on anti-discrimination frameworks and has held annual Skopje Pride events since 2019. A civil union bill has been discussed but not passed.
A significant issue: a Civil Registry bill that included legal gender recognition provisions was withdrawn, leaving transgender people in legal limbo despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling requiring North Macedonia to establish a gender recognition framework.
A 2025 German Marshall Fund report identified the anti-gender movement as one of the most organized destabilizing forces in North Macedonia and the wider Western Balkans — combining ultra-conservative values, nationalism, and EU skepticism into a coherent political force.
The Regional Picture
The primary engine of legal reform across the Balkans is EU accession. EU Chapters 23 and 24 explicitly require LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination protections. Countries with genuine aspirations toward membership — Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, North Macedonia, Kosovo — have real external incentives to adopt legal frameworks even when political will is weak domestically.
At the same time, a documented anti-gender movement is working against those changes with increasing sophistication. Balkan Insight has noted that political leaders’ hostile rhetoric directly correlates with surges in online hate against LGBTQ+ activists and Pride participants.
We want to be honest about our own experience: Tirana has been genuinely comfortable for us as a visibly gay couple. That’s not universal — trans travelers and more visibly gender-nonconforming travelers will have a different experience, and Tirana is very different from the rest of Albania. But the region is moving, unevenly and imperfectly, in a direction that was unimaginable a generation ago.
The Balkans are not a monolith. They’re a set of countries at different stages of a complicated transition, each with its own politics and pace. Covering them that way — rather than as a monolithic “dangerous region” or a flattened “underdog success story” — is something we’re committed to doing.
Sources: ILGA-Europe Rainbow Map 2025, Equaldex, ERA-LGBTI, 76crimes.com, Balkan Insight, German Marshall Fund, Civil Rights Defenders, Wikipedia, Citizens.al, European Western Balkans.
