The Law Says You Are Protected. The Reality Says Something Different.

If you live in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, or Kosovo, and you open the right legal document, you will find language that promises to protect you from discrimination. Anti-discrimination laws exist across the Western Balkans. Equality bodies exist. Formal frameworks are in place. On paper, the region has done a reasonable job of writing the rules.

The problem is not the rules. The problem is everything that happens when someone tries to use them.

A Region with Laws and Without Proper Enforcement

All six Western Balkan countries have adopted anti-discrimination legislation as part of their EU accession commitments. Serbia has had an anti-discrimination law since 2009. North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, and Kosovo all have their own versions of similar frameworks. These laws prohibit discrimination on a broad range of grounds, including race, ethnicity, gender, disability, religion, and in several countries, sexual orientation and gender identity.

The gap between this legislation and lived reality is enormous. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, in its sixth monitoring cycle report, identified key structural weaknesses across the region: widespread hate speech in political discourse, unequal access to education, housing, and policing, and limited resources for equality bodies. These findings repeat cycle after cycle because the underlying problems are not being fixed.

This is not a minor implementation gap. It is a fundamental failure of political will.

Roma Communities: Discrimination That Nobody Officially Sees

Roma communities across the Western Balkans experience discrimination that is so pervasive and so normalised that it barely registers in public debate. Children are often placed in segregated schools or directed into special education programmes on grounds that have nothing to do with actual learning needs. Access to housing, employment, and healthcare is structurally unequal. The Council of Europe’s anti-racism body identified combating racial profiling by law enforcement and addressing school segregation of Roma children as two of its four key policy challenges for European states in its 2024 annual report.

What makes this particularly difficult to address is that so little of it is recorded. Discrimination cases involving Roma communities rarely reach formal complaint mechanisms. When they do, the path through the system is slow, opaque, and often fruitless. The result is a situation where large-scale, systemic discrimination exists in plain sight but generates almost no official accountability.

LGBTI Rights: Progress on Paper, Regression in Practice

The picture for LGBTI people across the Western Balkans is complicated and, in recent years, has been moving in the wrong direction in several countries.

Montenegro and Serbia have relatively strong anti-discrimination legislation that explicitly covers sexual orientation and gender identity. Kosovo’s Prime Minister announced plans in 2024 to introduce legislation on same-sex partnerships as part of the country’s Council of Europe membership bid. These are not nothing.

But the broader regional trend is troubling. In June 2024, the relevant ministries of Republika Srpska (BiH) deliberately removed sexual orientation as a protected characteristic from anti-discrimination provisions, and on 26 March 2025, the National Assembly of Republika Srpska adopted legislation that the EU Delegation described as a direct threat to fundamental rights and democratic values. Multiple UN bodies wrote open letters urging the authorities to reverse course. They were ignored.

Across the region, anti-LGBTI disinformation has intensified since Russia’s war in Ukraine, with politicians, religious leaders, and newly formed organisations among the most common perpetrators of hate speech, which translates into actual violence against LGBTI people. The talking points are being borrowed and imported into EU candidate countries at the exact moment those countries are supposed to be meeting EU standards on fundamental rights.

LGBTI organisations in the Western Balkans have seen EU support decrease, forcing a number to close entirely, while they continue to face organised attacks against their physical spaces and the legal frameworks that protect them.

Equality Bodies: Underfunded and Underpowered

Every country in the region has an equality body. These institutions are supposed to receive complaints, investigate them, and in some cases impose sanctions. In practice, most of them are operating with resources so limited that they cannot perform their basic functions.

The problem is not purely financial. In several countries, equality bodies lack genuine independence from the executive. Appointments are political. Mandates are narrow. The power to impose meaningful sanctions is often missing entirely, which means even a successful complaint frequently results in nothing more than a recommendation that can be ignored.

Civil society organisations fill some of this gap, providing free legal advice and accompanying victims through complaint processes. But civil society in the region is itself under pressure. A 2025 research report on the Western Balkans found that while all six countries maintain formal legal frameworks guaranteeing fundamental freedoms, the operational reality for organisations working on gender equality and LGBTIQ+ issues is significantly more restrictive and hostile than for the broader civil society sector, with civic space described as “conditional, uneven, and often hostile.”

The EU Accession Lever

There is one structural force that has historically pushed the Western Balkans toward stronger anti-discrimination protection: the EU accession process. The annual European Commission progress reports assess each country against criteria that include the protection of fundamental rights, and those assessments have real consequences for the pace and credibility of accession negotiations.

The leverage is real, but it has limits. Countries can produce legal reforms that satisfy formal checklists without changing anything on the ground. Civil society voices have been explicit that the EU needs to insist that protecting fundamental rights is a genuine condition of accession, not a box-ticking exercise, and must use its leverage fully to support the adoption of legislation protecting the fundamental rights of LGBTI people while calling out attempts to advance laws that actively cancel EU fundamental rights.

What This Looks Like From Where You Stand

If you are a young Roma person trying to navigate an education system that was never designed with you in mind, anti-discrimination law is an abstraction. If you are a young LGBTI person in a country where political leaders use you as a target to win elections, the existence of an equality body is cold comfort when that body has no budget and no teeth.

The frameworks exist. In some places, the people inside them are trying their best. But the gap between the formal architecture of anti-discrimination protection and what actually happens to people who face discrimination every day remains wide enough to drive a truck through.

Closing that gap requires political will, sustained funding, genuine independence for equality bodies, and an EU accession process that treats fundamental rights as a non-negotiable condition rather than a rhetorical commitment. None of that is technically complicated. All of it remains, for now, unfinished.