Albania's LGBTI Action Plan Is Entering Its Final Year. Here's What It Promised, and What Is Still Waiting

We left Tirana in June after 174 days, and one thing that stays with you after that long in Albania is how often the conversation about LGBTQ+ rights comes back to paperwork. Not protests, not Pride, though Albania has both, but plans, benchmarks and deadlines, many of them tied to the country’s push to join the European Union.

One of the most important of those documents is about to run out of road. Albania’s National Action Plan for LGBTI People covers 2021 to 2027, which means the country is heading into the plan’s final year with a mixed record: some genuine wins, and several of its biggest promises still sitting on paper.

What the plan promised

The plan was adopted by the Council of Ministers in Decision No. 700 of November 18, 2021. It is coordinated by the Ministry of Health and Social Protection and built around three goals: better access to public services tailored to LGBTI+ people’s needs, stronger legal protection and access to justice, and a more inclusive, less discriminatory society.

Under those headings sit some very specific commitments. The plan calls for revising the Criminal Code on hate crime and hate speech, amending the Family Code with regard to same-sex relationships, preparing a new law on gender identity recognition, and reviewing civil status and adoption laws. On health, it promises unified treatment protocols for transgender and intersex people and better access to anonymous HIV and STI testing. It also commits to sustainable state funding for the Streha centre, which supports LGBTI+ people, and to extending services beyond the capital.

That last point was a lesson learned. The evaluation of the previous plan, which ran from 2016 to 2020, found that its benefits were concentrated in Tirana, that transgender and intersex people had seen less progress, and that budgets and staffing had fallen short, particularly after the 2019 earthquake and the pandemic.

The money for the current plan was never large. Its total cost is 351,909,255 lek, roughly €2.84 million over seven years. The state budget was expected to cover 62.3 percent and donors 18.3 percent, leaving a financing gap of 20.5 percent from the start.

What got done

Two things stand out.

The first is the Law on Gender Equality, adopted on October 30, 2025. As TGEU reported, it explicitly references sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, and civil society managed to see off proposed amendments that would have defined sex as “biologically immutable” and banned legal gender recognition. ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map records the law as extending protections on all three grounds. We covered the fight over that law as it happened, and it was closer than the final text suggests.

The second is the hormone therapy guideline. A Ministry of Health order approving clinical guidance on gender-affirming hormone therapy was signed on April 28 by Deputy Minister Eugena Tomini, Euronews Albania reported. Its limits matter: after a backlash from religious groups, Tomini said the document “is a clinical guidance tool and not a final therapeutic protocol,” that it applies “only to adults,” and that it “neither addresses nor establishes reimbursement schemes for hormone medications.” In August, Balkan Insight’s reporting confirmed that official documents provide no reimbursement for medication. It is a real first step for trans Albanians, and also a very cautious one.

The plan itself also earned international recognition. In March 2025, the UN Human Rights Committee listed its adoption among Albania’s positive steps in its concluding observations on the country.

What is still waiting

The harder commitments, the ones that need Parliament rather than a ministry, are where the plan has stalled.

Same-sex couples. Albania still has no legal recognition of same-sex couples. The same UN committee noted the government’s stated commitment to “legal recognition and protection of same-sex couples,” but regretted “that no such framework has yet been adopted,” and urged Albania to “expedite” one. ILGA-Europe says strategic litigation challenging the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage is pending, and lists partnership or cohabitation recognition as its first recommendation for the country. The issue also runs straight through the EU process, as we wrote when civil unions emerged as an accession benchmark.

Legal gender recognition. The plan promised a new law on gender identity recognition. There is still no established procedure, and, according to TGEU, trans people are left to pursue lengthy court cases instead. ILGA-Europe notes that Albania rejected a recommendation at its UN Universal Periodic Review to introduce legal gender recognition based on self-identification.

Hate crime and hate speech. ILGA-Europe still recommends that Albania adopt hate crime legislation that explicitly covers sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics, and it describes the situation as a concerning escalation, reporting that 61 percent of respondents to a recent survey had personally experienced or directly witnessed discrimination or violence in the past year. Albania’s Commissioner for Protection from Discrimination, Robert Gajda, told Reporter.al in April that his office had handled 15 hate speech cases in the previous year with the LGBTI community as the main target, and that there had been “an increased wave of hate speech, especially during the debate on the Law for Gender Equality.” The institution meant to enforce these protections has its own problem: the UN committee flagged the “continuous postponement” since 2023 of appointing a new mandate holder for the Commissioner’s office.

Why the last year matters

An action plan is not a law. It cannot force Parliament to vote, and it does not guarantee a budget. What it does is give activists a government-signed list of promises to hold up, and give Brussels a yardstick. As Albania pushes to close its EU accession negotiations, the gap between what the 2021 plan committed to and what exists in law in 2027 will be one of the clearest measures of how seriously those commitments were meant.

It will also shape what comes next. The previous plan’s evaluation fed directly into this one; the evaluation of this plan should do the same, and the organisations doing the daily work, among them Aleanca, Pink Embassy and Streha, have every reason to push for a successor that puts the unfinished legislation first rather than last.

Albania has changed in the years we have been coming back to it, and some of that change is written into this plan. The final year is where we find out how much of the rest was ever going to leave the page.