Serbia

Serbia shows what a good anti-discrimination law cannot do on its own. The Law on the Prohibition of Discrimination covers sexual orientation and gender identity across employment, education, housing and services and scores 64 % with ILGA-Europe, the strongest figure of any country on this site outside the West. Bias motive has been an aggravating circumstance in the Criminal Code since 2012. The country had an openly lesbian prime minister for seven years. And same-sex couples have no recognition whatsoever — zero out of a hundred in the family category — because the two bills that would change that were drafted, checked by the responsible ministry, and then left where they are: the President has said they will not be adopted while he is in office.

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

Phase I: From Yugoslavia to Decriminalisation (1977–1994)
Socialist Yugoslavia devolved criminal law to its republics, and they did not move together. Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and the province of Vojvodina decriminalised homosexuality in 1977; Serbia proper did not.

1994: Serbia repeals the provision, seventeen years after the northern republics. The age of consent is equalised in 2006.

Phase II: Pride as a Public Order Question (2001–2013)
For over a decade the question in Serbia was not what rights gay people had but whether they could stand in a street.

2001: The first attempt at a Belgrade Pride, on 30 June, is broken up by hooligans and far-right groups. Participants are beaten and the police do not hold the line.

2010: The second parade goes ahead on 10 October and sets off the Belgrade anti-gay riot. Roughly 6,000 counter-demonstrators attack the march and then the city centre; more than a hundred police officers are injured.

2011–2013: The parade is banned three years running on security grounds — the state's answer to violence being to remove the target.

Phase III: The Legal Framework Arrives (2005–2012)
While the marches were being banned, the statute book was being rewritten, largely under the pull of EU accession.

2005: The Labour Act bans discrimination in employment on grounds of sexual orientation.

2006: The new Constitution is adopted. Article 62 provides that marriage is entered into on the free consent of a man and a woman — the wall that every partnership proposal since has run into.

2009: The Law on the Prohibition of Discrimination is adopted, naming sexual orientation and gender identity and reaching across employment, education, housing and services. It creates the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality, a state body that hears complaints and still functions. An amendment in 2021 adds sex characteristics.

2012: On 24 December parliament writes bias motive into the Criminal Code as an aggravating circumstance, explicitly covering sexual orientation and gender identity. The first conviction under it comes in 2018, six years later.

Phase IV: Visibility Without Legislation (2014–2022)
2014: Pride returns to Belgrade and has been held every year since, behind large police cordons.

2017: Ana Brnabić becomes prime minister, the first openly lesbian head of government in the region, and attends Pride the same year. Her partner gives birth to their son in 2019 while she is in office. She holds the post until 2024 and is now Speaker of the National Assembly. Nothing in family law changes in those seven years.

2019: A rulebook allows a change of legal gender after a year of hormone therapy with psychiatric and endocrinological confirmation, without surgery. There is still no Gender Identity Act, and the category scores 19 %.

2022: Belgrade hosts EuroPride, the first city in south-east Europe to do so. In August the President announces it is cancelled and the police formally ban the march; after weeks of international pressure it takes place on 17 September on a shortened route, with around 10,000 people.

Phase V: The Two Bills That Will Not Be Signed (2021–2026)
2021: A draft Law on Same-Sex Unions is prepared. President Aleksandar Vučić says he will not sign it, calling it unconstitutional, and it is never put to a vote.

2022–2026: Drafts of both that law and a Law on Gender Identity sit confirmed by the Ministry of Human and Minority Rights and Social Dialogue and untabled. They have been the first two demands of Belgrade Pride for years, and the demands are repeated unchanged because nothing on the list has been met. Pride Week 2025 ran under the slogan "For the Family"; the 2026 march is set for 6 September. ILGA-Europe scores Serbia 67 % on civil society space — comfortably the lowest of the countries added to this site recently, and a measure of how much room the organisations doing this work actually have.