North Macedonia's Anti-Discrimination Commission Is in Trouble — Again
Five years after parliament rebuilt the body that's supposed to protect LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities, and the disabled, new appointments are raising old fears that politics is about to gut it from the inside.
The Commission for Prevention and Protection Against Discrimination in North Macedonia has had a turbulent decade. It was created, gutted by a Constitutional Court ruling, rebuilt under pressure from civil society and the EU, and now — five years after its second beginning — civil society groups in Skopje are warning that the country may be about to do it all over again.
The trigger is a round of appointments that parliament is moving through this spring. Balkan Insight reported last week that several of the names being floated for the seven-seat commission are tied to the country’s ruling political bloc, and that the selection process has been notably opaque even by North Macedonian standards. For LGBTQ+ groups in particular, who rely on the body to handle complaints that the courts will not, the prospect of a politically captured commission is not a hypothetical concern. They have been here before.
What the Commission is supposed to do
The Commission is North Macedonia’s specialised equality body. It handles individual discrimination complaints, issues recommendations, conducts research, and — crucially — has the authority to find that a government ministry, employer, or school has acted unlawfully under the country’s anti-discrimination law.
That law, passed in 2019, was a milestone. It explicitly listed sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression as protected categories. For North Macedonia, where there is still no legal recognition of same-sex couples and where legal gender recognition for trans people requires navigating an unwritten bureaucratic maze, the equality law and the Commission that enforces it have been the most concrete legal protection LGBTQ+ people in the country actually have.
The complaint system has produced meaningful results. The Commission has ruled in favour of LGBTQ+ complainants in cases involving workplace dismissal, refusal of service, and police inaction on hate incidents. Those rulings are not binding the way court judgments are, but they generate paper trails, embarrass the institutions involved, and feed into the country’s EU accession reporting — which is the part Skopje cares about.
The 2020 collapse, in brief
The original 2010 anti-discrimination law was struck down by the Constitutional Court in May 2020 on procedural grounds — the court ruled that parliament had passed amendments without a sufficient quorum. The Commission attached to that law ceased to exist overnight. For more than a year, North Macedonia had no functioning equality body at all.
LGBTQ+ groups, women’s rights groups, the country’s small Jewish community, disability advocates, and Roma organisations all spent that year warning that the gap was not theoretical. Discrimination complaints had nowhere to go. The 2021 reinstatement, when it finally came, was won partly through domestic civil society pressure and partly through quiet EU intervention. Brussels was clear that an EU candidate country could not credibly progress accession negotiations while operating without an equality body.
The 2021 law was, on paper, an improvement. The commission was given a stronger mandate, its members were supposed to be selected through a more transparent process, and civil society had a formal advisory role in nominations. That was the deal in 2021. The current concern is that the 2026 reality is starting to drift from the 2021 deal.
What civil society is flagging now
Three concerns are getting raised, by groups including ERA-LGBTI, Coalition MARGINS, and the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights of North Macedonia.
First, candidate transparency. The 2021 law set up an open call process. Civil society groups say the call this round has had unusually short deadlines and that the shortlist circulating in Skopje contains names that were not publicly visible during the consultation window.
Second, political alignment. Several of the candidates reportedly have direct party-political histories — not as registered party members, necessarily, but through advisory roles, party-aligned NGOs, or municipal positions in parties that voted against the original anti-discrimination law. A commission that is supposed to protect minorities from majority politics cannot be staffed by people whose careers were built inside that majority politics.
Third, sectoral expertise. The 2021 framework requires that commissioners come from diverse backgrounds — legal, civil society, academic — and that protected groups have representation. Civil society sources told Balkan Insight that the current shortlist is heavy on legal generalists and light on people with substantive experience of the issues the commission actually rules on.
None of these concerns individually amount to a scandal. The fear is that together, they signal that the commission is about to become what it was structurally vulnerable to becoming all along: a body that exists, that ticks the box for EU reporting, and that quietly stops doing the work.
The EU accession angle
North Macedonia has been an EU candidate since 2005 — one of the longest-running candidacies in the bloc’s history. The accession negotiations have been blocked by a series of bilateral disputes (with Greece over the country’s name, now resolved; with Bulgaria over language and history, ongoing). Brussels evaluates fundamental rights as part of the accession framework. A functioning anti-discrimination commission is one of the things the European Commission’s annual country report looks at. A non-functioning one shows up.
If the appointments go through as flagged, expect this to appear in the next progress report. Whether that matters depends entirely on what Brussels is willing to do with it. North Macedonia’s accession track is so stalled on other grounds that LGBTQ+ rights are unlikely to be the thing that finally unblocks or blocks anything. But it is one more piece of the case that the country’s institutional reforms have been less durable than the law on the books suggests.
What to watch
Parliament is expected to vote on the nominations later this month. Three things are worth watching: whether the civil society sector formally objects through the joint statement mechanism that the 2021 law set up; whether the Helsinki Committee or ILGA-Europe trigger a written communication to the European Commission delegation in Skopje; and whether the eventual commission, once seated, takes on any of the cases that the outgoing body has left pending.
If the new commission gets to work and quietly handles the queue, this story will have been a near miss. If complaints start piling up unprocessed, or if the commission begins to dismiss LGBTQ+ cases on technicalities, the warning signs from this spring will have been correct.
For people in North Macedonia who depend on this body, that is not an abstract policy question. It is whether the most concrete legal protection they have against discrimination still functions in three months’ time.
