Full legal context
North Macedonia scores 29.26 % on the Rainbow Map, and two of its numbers should be read together. Civil society space scores 100 %, the same as Denmark and Spain. Family scores 4 %, because same-sex couples have no legal recognition of any kind. This is a country where the community can organise, register, receive public money and run a national helpline with a ministry, and where two people who have lived together for twenty years are strangers in law.
Sex between men has been legal since 1996, decriminalised as a condition of joining the Council of Europe. Marriage is defined in family law as a union between a man and a woman. An attempt to write that ban into the constitution in 2015 failed to reach the two-thirds majority it needed, so the constitution is silent, which is the small mercy that leaves the question open.
Here is the historical overview of the legalisation of homosexuality and gay rights in North Macedonia.
Phase I: Decriminalisation (1996)
1996: Same-sex acts are decriminalised as a condition of Council of Europe membership. Nothing follows for over a decade.
Phase II: The Law That Had to Be Passed Twice (2010 to 2021)
2010: Sexual orientation is removed from the protected grounds of the anti-discrimination bill before it passes, after having been covered in employment law since 2008.
2019: In March parliament adopts a comprehensive anti-discrimination law naming sexual orientation and gender identity.
2020: In May the Constitutional Court strikes the law down on procedural grounds. After heavy pressure from civil society and international bodies, parliament passes it again in October. It has been in force since.
2019: In the same year the European Court of Human Rights rules in X v. North Macedonia that requiring surgery before a gender marker can be changed violates the right to private life. Since 2021 a change has been possible in practice. There is still no law setting out how, which is why legal gender recognition scores 10 %.
Phase III: A March and a Helpline (2013 to 2026)
2013: The first Pride Week is held in Skopje.
2019: The first Pride parade takes place on 29 June with about a thousand people, government ministers and foreign ambassadors among them. It has been held since, without the scenes that have met Pride elsewhere in the region.
2023: The Grand Chamber ruling in Fedotova and Others, handed down in January, obliges every Council of Europe member state to provide some legal framework for same-sex couples. North Macedonia, like several of its neighbours, has not.
2026: The national LGBTI helpline, run by Subversive Front with the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, is the clearest thing to point a reader at, and it is a joint project with the state.
