The largest human rights organization for trans people in Europe and Central Asia, Transgender Europe (TGEU), yesterday published the Trans Rights Index & Map 2026, the most comprehensive analysis of the legal status of trans people across 54 countries in Europe and Central Asia. Montenegro fulfills 16 out of 32 indicators, which is exactly 50% of the maximum possible score.
However, the result becomes far more revealing when viewed by category. In the areas of protection from hate crimes and hate speech, Montenegro achieves the maximum score (3/3), while in anti-discrimination protections it scores almost perfectly (7/8). Still, since the index measures only the legislative framework and not its implementation, these results do not reflect the reality on the ground, where trans people continue to face discrimination and violence on a daily basis despite the existence of legal protection mechanisms. And it is precisely in the areas that most directly determine the quality of trans people’s everyday lives that the results are alarming: legal gender recognition fulfills only 5 out of 14 criteria, while healthcare and family rights score 0 out of 2. Trans people still lack adequate access to healthcare, family rights, and identity documents that reflect who they are.
This finding does not come as a surprise to civil society organizations that have monitored this field for years, but it requires clearly naming what lies behind it. The unwillingness of the ruling majority to stand up for human rights is reflected in the fact that the Law on Legal Gender Recognition Based on Self-Determination, included in Montenegro’s EU Accession Programme for 2026, has faced obstacles to adoption for the third consecutive year. As a result, Montenegro remains one of only nine countries where legal gender recognition is conditioned on sterilization.
The TGEU report documents a Europe divided between those countries that, despite growing anti-gender pressures — one of the key drivers of which is the coordinated policy of Russian influence in neighboring states — still manage to make progress, and those that use this pressure as an excuse for stagnation or regression. By improving their legislative frameworks, Albania, the Czech Republic, and Spain stand on one side, while Belarus and Slovakia stand on the other. Montenegro, with a self-determination law still waiting in a drawer, has yet to decide where it stands.
Increasingly vocal narratives that question gender equality, reproductive rights, and human rights in general do not emerge in a vacuum. They develop precisely in the space created when ruling majorities refuse to take a clear stance. Both reports — the TGEU report and the ILGA-Europe report published the same day, which ranks Montenegro 18th out of 49 European countries with progress of only one place — confirm the same conclusion: Montenegro has the legislative framework, it has EU obligations, and it has a history of once being an example for the region. The main question is whose side our decision-makers are on, and whether they will demonstrate this while there is still room for the issue to remain a matter of choice rather than a response to damage that has already been done.
We therefore once again call on the Government and Members of Parliament to adopt the Law on Legal Gender Recognition Based on Self-Determination within the timeframe envisaged by the Accession Programme and, by doing so, clearly affirm which side of democratic Europe Montenegro stands on.
