LGBTQ Legal Status
Belgium's legal relationship with homosexuality has followed a markedly different path from many of its neighbours. Unlike Germany or the United Kingdom, Belgium never had a sustained tradition of harsh criminalisation in the modern era. This was largely a consequence of geography and history: when France annexed the territory in 1795, it brought with it the French Penal Code of 1791, which had decriminalised sodomy. From that point on, private sexual acts between consenting adults were no longer a criminal matter in what would become Belgium, a position the country retained after independence. When Belgium enacted its own Penal Code in 1867, it maintained this tradition, keeping homosexuality legal and setting an equal age of consent at 16 for all citizens.
That relatively tolerant legal foundation did not, however, prevent discrimination from taking root in the mid-twentieth century. In 1965, parliament passed a youth protection law that introduced a two-tier age of consent: whilst heterosexual activity remained legal from the age of 16, homosexual acts were only permissible from the age of 18. This measure gave fresh impetus to a nascent gay rights movement, and homosexuality appeared as a public topic in the media for the first time. Police also routinely used public indecency laws to raid gay bars and saunas, even though the acts themselves were not criminal. The discriminatory age of consent was eventually abolished in 1985, when Article 372bis was repealed, restoring equality before the law.
The most dramatic period of legal change came in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The election of a liberal-socialist-green coalition government in 1999 brought gay rights firmly onto the political agenda. In 1998, parliament had already passed the Statutory Cohabitation Act, which came into force on 1 January 2000 and gave cohabiting couples, including same-sex couples, limited legal recognition, covering matters such as shared tax benefits and certain inheritance rights. An Anti-Discrimination Act followed on 25 February 2003, making it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in employment, housing, and the provision of goods and services. Then, on 13 February 2003, King Albert II granted royal assent to the same-sex marriage bill, which had passed the Chamber of Representatives by 91 votes to 22. The law came into force on 1 June 2003, making Belgium the second country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage, following the Netherlands. Initially, the legislation did not extend adoption rights to same-sex couples, a gap that was closed in 2006 when parliament amended the law to allow joint adoption on the same terms as heterosexual couples.
Further milestones followed in the years after marriage equality was secured. In 2007, legal access to medically assisted reproduction was formalised for lesbian couples and single women. In December 2011, Elio Di Rupo was sworn in as Prime Minister, becoming the world's first openly gay man to serve as head of government and the second openly LGBT head of government overall, after Iceland's Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, who had taken office in 2009. A revised Transgender Law came into effect in 2018, removing the previous requirements for sterilisation and a medical diagnosis in order to change one's legal gender markers, replacing them with a process of self-declaration. Most recently, in 2023, parliament passed a law banning conversion practices, meaning attempts to alter a person's sexual orientation or gender identity, for both minors and adults alike.
Taken together, these developments have placed Belgium among the most progressive countries in Europe on LGBT rights. ILGA-Europe consistently ranks it near the top of its annual Rainbow Map, and public support for same-sex marriage and equal rights has grown steadily, with large majorities now backing full legal equality
