Montenegro Promised a Gender Recognition Law Based on Self-ID. Two Years Later, It's Still Just a Draft.

Montenegro likes to present itself as the Western Balkans’ EU accession success story — the country closest to the finish line, the one Brussels points to when it needs a good-news headline about enlargement. But a periodic report published by the European Parliament this June put a spotlight on a promise Podgorica has been sitting on for more than two years: a law that would let transgender people change their legal gender based on self-declaration, rather than the medicalized, court-supervised process currently in place.

The draft Law on Legal Gender Recognition based on self-determination has been on the table since February 2024, when the government presented it publicly after consultations with the European Commission and domestic civil society groups. It has not been adopted. The European Parliament’s report notes the delay explicitly, tying it to Montenegro’s broader commitments under Chapter 23 of the accession process — the chapter covering judiciary and fundamental rights, which candidate countries have to satisfy before they can join.

A pattern, not an accident

For LGBTQ+ rights groups in Montenegro, the stalled bill fits a pattern they’ve been describing for years: the country performs well on paper and in EU progress reports, while implementation lags badly behind. Montenegro currently sits 18th out of 49 European countries on ILGA-Europe’s 2026 Rainbow Map, with an overall score of 53% — solid by regional standards, but a number civil society groups say masks how uneven progress actually is on the ground.

The Centre for Civic Education, a Podgorica-based rights organization, has been among the loudest voices pointing out the gap between rhetoric and reality. The group has argued that LGBTIQ+ rights sit at the heart of what EU accession is supposed to mean — genuine rule of law and equal treatment — and that Montenegro’s authorities keep treating them as a box to check rather than a commitment to follow through on.

The self-determination bill isn’t the only unfinished business. Montenegro’s Law on Prohibition of Discrimination and its Law on Life Partnership of Persons of the Same Sex — the 2020 civil partnership law that was itself a genuine milestone for the Western Balkans — both remain incompletely implemented more than five years after they were meant to take effect. Civil partnerships exist on paper, but same-sex couples report ongoing friction when they try to actually use the rights the law is supposed to guarantee them, from inheritance to hospital visitation.

Why gender recognition matters here specifically

Under Montenegro’s current system, transgender people seeking to update their legal gender marker still have to go through a process that typically requires medical documentation and, in practice, can involve years of bureaucratic back-and-forth with courts that have little established precedent for handling these cases consistently. Advocates say this leaves trans Montenegrins in a kind of legal limbo — unable to get IDs, diplomas, or property documents that match who they are, which in turn creates friction in everything from job applications to crossing borders.

A self-determination model, by contrast, would let people update their legal gender through an administrative declaration, without requiring surgery, hormone therapy, or a diagnosis. It’s the model Denmark pioneered in 2014 and that a growing number of European countries — including, following a 2026 EU Court of Justice ruling on a Bulgarian case, an expanding list of member states — have moved toward. Montenegro’s own draft bill, on paper, follows this approach. The problem, per the European Parliament’s report, isn’t the substance of the bill. It’s that the government hasn’t brought it to a vote.

The accession clock

Montenegro’s government has set 2028 as its target date for EU membership, which would make it the bloc’s newest member. Whether that timeline holds depends heavily on how the European Commission scores the country’s Chapter 23 progress in its next annual report, expected later this year. Rights groups are hoping the gender recognition bill’s continued absence from the legislative agenda becomes harder for Brussels to overlook the closer Montenegro gets to the finish line — precisely because accession is supposed to mean rights on the books translate into rights in practice, not just a pending draft that’s been sitting untouched since 2024.

For now, trans Montenegrins are left waiting on a law that has already cleared its consultations, that the government itself introduced, and that keeps getting pushed to the next legislative session — with no formal timeline for when, or whether, that session finally arrives.