{"chart":{"title":"Constitutional protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity","subtitle":"Only constitutions that name sexual orientation or gender identity are counted, plus top-court rulings in Nepal and Taiwan. Protections that courts have read into general equality clauses elsewhere are not included.","citation":"Velasco (2026)","originalChartUrl":"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/constitutional-protections-lgbt","selection":["South Korea","Sri Lanka","Somalia","South Sudan"]},"columns":{"Constitutional protections (sexual orientation and gender identity)":{"titleShort":"Constitutional protections","titleLong":"Constitutional protections","descriptionShort":"Whether the national constitution protects sexual orientation, gender identity, both, or neither.","descriptionKey":"- This data comes from the LGBTI National Policy Dataset, compiled by Kristopher Velasco at Princeton University. It tracks the adoption, scope, and enforcement of 27 LGBTI-related policies across 195 countries, with annual data starting in 1991.\n- The indicator is coded as follows: **_Both protected_** (the constitution protects both sexual orientation and gender identity), **_Sexual orientation only_** (only sexual orientation is protected) and **_Not protected_** (the constitution does not protect either ground).\n- Only constitutions that name sexual orientation or gender identity are counted. For sexual orientation, there are two exceptions: Nepal, where courts have applied the open-ended equality grounds of the 2015 constitution to it, and Taiwan, where the top court ruled in 2017 that the constitution's equality clause covers it. Protections that courts have read into general equality clauses elsewhere, or that come from ordinary laws, are not counted.\n- The dataset counts policies established by binding legal instruments — statutes, constitutional provisions, decrees and regulations with the force of law, and binding court rulings. Where no law governs a policy, a written rule that does can count too, such as a health-authority guideline, a blood service's donor questionnaire or a religious ruling. Bills, ministerial statements and non-binding declarations are not counted.","descriptionProcessing":"The original dataset has separate indicators for sexual orientation and for gender identity. We combined them into one indicator that shows whether national law covers both grounds, only one, or neither. When either ground is covered in only part of the country, we classify the country as \"Varies by region\".","shortUnit":"","unit":"","timespan":"1991-2025","type":"Ordinal","owidVariableId":1354588,"shortName":"constitutional_protections","lastUpdated":"2026-07-15","nextUpdate":"2027-07-15","citationShort":"Velasco (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data","citationLong":"Velasco (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Constitutional protections – Velasco” [dataset]. Velasco, “LGBTI National Policy Dataset 3.0” [original data].","fullMetadata":"https://api.ourworldindata.org/v1/indicators/1354588.metadata.json"}},"dateDownloaded":"2026-10-31"}