Liechtenstein

Liechtenstein has had marriage equality since 1 January 2025 and joint adoption since 2023, which puts its family law level with Germany's. It also has no anti-discrimination statute covering employment, no procedure for changing legal gender, and no gay venue of any kind in the whole country. That combination — a small, wealthy, deeply Catholic principality of 40,000 people that settled the biggest question while leaving the ordinary ones open — is why it scores 31 % on the Rainbow Map despite allowing same-sex couples to marry.

Here is the historical overview of the legalisation of homosexuality and gay rights in Liechtenstein.

Phase I: Total Ban, Then Four Leftover Paragraphs (1989–2001)
Homosexual acts were entirely prohibited until the end of the 1980s, and the law that replaced the ban kept several inequalities in place for another decade.

1989: Sections 129 and 130 of the Criminal Code are repealed and the total ban falls. What takes its place is modelled on Austrian law and is not equal treatment: a higher age of consent for same-sex acts, a separate prostitution provision, a ban on "promoting" homosexuality, and — Section 221 — a ban on associations of homosexuals.

1998: FLay is founded in Schaan as a "culture and leisure association for homosexuals", at a time when an association of that kind was still nominally illegal.

2000–2001: All four remaining provisions are struck without replacement, including the association ban and the unequal age of consent.

Phase II: Registered Partnership, Put to the People (2011)
Liechtenstein is a direct democracy with a monarch who can withhold assent, so a reform here has to survive two things nothing else in Europe imposes in quite the same way.

2011: The Landtag adopts the Partnership Act in March. Opponents force a referendum, and on 19 June about 69 % of voters approve it. It takes effect on 1 September. The law deliberately excludes adoption and access to reproductive medicine — Article 25 says so explicitly.

Phase III: The Courts Take Out Article 25 (2021–2023)
2021: The Constitutional Court holds in May that barring registered partners from adopting a partner's child is unconstitutional. Prince Hans-Adam II, who had said he could accept same-sex marriage but not adoption by same-sex couples, warns publicly that full equality could meet a veto.

2022–2023: Parliament repeals Article 25 of the Partnership Act. Stepchild adoption and then joint adoption become available to same-sex couples, joint adoption from 2023. Reproductive medicine is opened at the same time, though it remains tightly restricted in Liechtenstein for everyone.

Phase IV: Marriage (2024–2025)
2024: The Landtag passes marriage equality on 8 March by 24 votes to 1 and confirms it on 16 May. No referendum is called against it. The Prince gives his assent in July, and the law enters into force on 1 January 2025. Existing registered partnerships can be converted to marriage; no new ones can be entered into. Archbishop Wolfgang Haas, whose archdiocese covers the whole country, had called the reform a "diabolical attack" two years earlier.

Phase V: What Was Left Out
Everything that is not about couples is still missing, and this is where the country's score comes from.

Anti-discrimination: there is no civil anti-discrimination law naming sexual orientation — not for employment, not for housing, not for goods and services. Liechtenstein is in the EEA rather than the EU, and the EU employment equality directive was never taken over. What exists is criminal: since April 2016, Section 283 of the Criminal Code has made it an offence, punishable by up to two years, to publicly disparage or incite hatred against people on grounds of their sexual orientation, including online and through symbols. That single provision is the whole of the legal protection, and it does not name gender identity.

Legal gender recognition: there is no statutory procedure at all. Liechtenstein scores 10 % in that category and nothing at all on intersex bodily integrity.