Half of the EU's Candidate Countries Now Have a Rollback Problem. A New Report Names Them.

Every year, ILGA-Europe and the ERA (Equal Rights Association for Eastern Europe and Central Asia) publish a joint review of LGBTI rights across the countries in the EU’s accession pipeline. It’s not a headline-grabbing document most years — more of a status report, chapter by chapter, country by country. This year’s edition, covering Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Türkiye, and Ukraine, has a new section that wasn’t a fixture of past reviews: a dedicated accounting of legislative rollbacks. Five of the ten countries now have one.

That’s the headline finding, and the report is blunt about what it means. “Negative legislative developments have become a defining feature of the context in which LGBTI equality is being contested,” the review states — not isolated incidents in a couple of backsliding states, but a pattern across half the candidate pool.

What’s actually rolling back

The specifics vary by country, but they share a shape: protections that existed on paper are being narrowed by law, not just neglected in practice.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska replaced “gender identity” with the vaguer “other personal characteristic” in its hate crime provisions in March 2025, stripping out the specific protection that made the law enforceable for trans victims in the first place. Weeks later, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina narrowed its domestic violence law to cover only opposite-sex partners, cutting same-sex couples out of protections they’d previously been able to invoke.

North Macedonia’s rollback centers on education, where the report documents new restrictions on how LGBTI topics can be addressed in schools — part of a broader pattern TrueQueer has covered before, including the credibility crisis at the country’s own anti-discrimination commission.

Albania’s entry is different in kind: not a law that already passed, but an organized attempt to undo one. A coalition is pushing a referendum to repeal the country’s Law on Gender Equality, which passed in November 2025 with explicit protections on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics. Albania’s constitution generally shields rights-related legislation from referendum repeal, so the legal path to actually overturning the law is narrow — but the report treats the campaign itself, and the political normalization it represents, as part of the region’s backsliding story regardless of whether it succeeds procedurally.

Where the news is better

The review isn’t uniformly grim. Montenegro gets a specific, positive callout: a draft legal gender recognition law based on self-determination rather than the surgery-and-sterilization model still in force in most of the region — putting Montenegro ahead of several EU member states on that specific question, even as TrueQueer has reported on how unevenly its existing protections are actually enforced day to day.

Kosovo’s entry is less a rollback than a freeze. Legal recognition for same-sex couples and a trans gender-recognition procedure have both been stuck since institutional deadlock followed the country’s February 2025 elections; a Draft Law on Civil Status has been sitting untouched since 2023. Nothing has gotten worse in Kosovo, by this account — it’s just that nothing has moved.

Serbia’s assessment is more about democratic erosion generally than LGBTI-specific legislation: the report says Serbia has largely avoided passing discriminatory laws, but flags a broader deterioration in conditions for human rights defenders that inevitably touches LGBTI civil society too.

The one enforcement mechanism with actual teeth

The most consequential item in the review may not be about the Balkans at all. In April, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled against Hungary’s “anti-LGBT propaganda” law, finding it incompatible with Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union — the article defining the EU’s foundational values. That’s a different kind of finding than a rights group’s annual criticism: it establishes, at the level of EU law, that anti-LGBTI legislation isn’t just controversial but structurally incompatible with what membership is supposed to require.

For accession countries, that ruling changes the stakes of every rollback documented in this review. A hate-crime provision quietly narrowed in Republika Srpska, or a referendum campaign against Albania’s gender equality law, isn’t just a domestic political fight anymore — it’s the kind of thing the CJEU has now said EU membership itself doesn’t tolerate. Whether Brussels actually enforces that standard as consistently for candidate countries as it did against a sitting member state is the open question the next several accession review cycles will answer.

The report also introduces prison conditions for LGBTI people as a new monitoring category, driven largely by patterns of judicial harassment in Türkiye, and points to the October 2025 Council of Europe recommendation on intersex rights as the first international standard to address intersex discrimination specifically. Across all ten countries, the same two priorities keep surfacing: legal recognition of same-sex couples and legal gender recognition — both flagged as essential not for symbolic reasons but for the practical mechanics of inheritance, pensions, healthcare access, and family reunification that same-sex couples across the region are still locked out of.

Sources: LGBTI Enlargement Review 2026; CJEU ruling on Hungary’s anti-LGBT law.