Which Countries Criminalise Being LGBTQ+? A 2026 Employer Guide

As of ILGA World's Pride Month 2026 data, 65 UN member states still criminalise consensual same-sex sexual acts. Seven prescribe the death penalty by law, and in five more there is no full legal certainty. A further 13 jurisdictions criminalise the gender identity or expression of transgender people. For any employer that sends staff across borders, that is not a human rights footnote — it is a duty-of-care obligation attached to specific flights, visas and postings.

Most employers are not meeting it. In the most detailed study of the question, more than 90% of LGBT+ people who had worked on an international assignment said they received no information from their employer about local LGBT+ laws, networks or culture — either before or after being offered the assignment.

How many countries criminalise being LGBTQ+ in 2026?

Sixty-five UN member states, according to ILGA World's Pride Month 2026 release. ILGA notes that in 2025 the total grew for the first time in almost a decade.

A second authority, the Human Dignity Trust, counts 66 jurisdictions. The difference is methodological rather than factual: ILGA counts UN member states, the Human Dignity Trust counts jurisdictions including non-member territories. Use one source consistently rather than mixing the two.

The death penalty picture, unchanged across ILGA's 2024, 2025 and 2026 releases:

• Legally prescribed in seven states: Brunei, Mauritania, Iran, Nigeria (12 provinces), Saudi Arabia, Uganda and Yemen.
• No full legal certainty in five more: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia and the United Arab Emirates.

Separately, 18 UN member states allow legal gender recognition on the basis of self-determination at national level, and 13 criminalise trans identity or expression. For a trans employee, the second figure is the one that determines whether a passport, a visa application or an airport security queue is a risk.

What has changed recently, and why static country lists fail

The single most important operational point for a mobility team is that this list moves in both directions, and it has moved in both directions within the last twenty-four months. A country briefing written in 2023 and filed is not a control.

Newly criminalising or regressive: Iraq passed a law criminalising same-sex relations in April 2024. Mali adopted a new Penal Code provision in October 2024, published that December. In March 2025 Trinidad and Tobago's Court of Appeal reversed the 2018 decriminalisation ruling, reinstating the offence with a reduced maximum sentence. In September 2025 Burkina Faso criminalised same-sex conduct for the first time in its history, with penalties of two to five years' imprisonment extending to "behaviour likely to promote homosexual practices".

Decriminalising: Dominica and Namibia both decriminalised through their courts in 2024. In July 2025 Saint Lucia's High Court struck down sections 132 and 133 of its Criminal Code as unconstitutional.

Four of those six changes came from courts rather than legislatures, which is why they arrive without the notice period a policy team would like. Trinidad and Tobago is the instructive case: an employer that had marked it safe in 2019 on the strength of the original judgment would have been wrong from March 2025 onward, with no legislative signal to prompt a review.

What is an employer's duty of care to LGBTQ+ business travellers?

There is no LGBTQ+-specific international standard. ISO 31030:2021 is the relevant travel risk management standard and is the framework most large employers work to, though its published scope does not itself address sexual orientation or gender identity — applying it to LGBTQ+ travellers is an interpretation that consultancies and mobility teams have made, not a requirement the standard states.

The purpose-built resources that do exist are these. Stonewall publishes Safe Travels: Global Mobility for LGBT Staff alongside country-level Global Workplace Briefings, available to its Proud Employers members. The Global Business Travel Association published five recommendations for protecting the LGBTQ mobile workforce, covering equal treatment, LGBTQ-specific considerations in travel risk programmes, annual manager education, employee support, and LGBT-specific provisions in mobility policy. International SOS operates a commercial LGBTQ+ module covering destination attitudes, immigration and airport security rules, medication importation and access to safe support.

Two cautions if you are building a business case from published material. The GBTA guidance dates from 2019, updated 2022, and its criminalisation figure is now out of step with both ILGA and the Human Dignity Trust — take the recommendations, not the numbers. And the Open For Business finding quoted at the top of this article comes from Working Globally, announced in December 2020; it remains the best evidence on the briefing gap, but it is five years old and should be cited with its date.

The practical questions a mobility policy has to answer

The failure mode is almost never a refusal to care. It is that nobody has decided in advance who answers these questions, so they get answered in the week before a flight, by whoever is available.

• Who is briefed, and how, without requiring anyone to out themselves? If the LGBTQ+ briefing is only given to people who ask for it, you have built a system that requires disclosure to access safety information. Brief everyone travelling to a given destination on that destination's laws, and the problem disappears.
• Can an assignment be declined without career consequence? Write down the answer. If declining a posting to a criminalising jurisdiction is career-limiting in practice, the policy is decorative.
• Do partner and family benefits survive the border? Relocation packages routinely assume a spouse visa that a same-sex partner cannot obtain. That is a compensation question, not a legal one, and it needs a stated fallback.
• What happens to a trans employee whose documents do not match? Passport gender markers, visa applications and security screening are three separate exposure points, and the 13 jurisdictions criminalising gender expression are not the same list as the 65.
• Who reviews the list, and when? Given that four of the last six changes came from courts, an annual review cycle will be wrong for part of every year. Name an owner and a trigger.

Frequently asked questions

How many countries criminalise homosexuality in 2026?

65 UN member states, per ILGA World's Pride Month 2026 data. The Human Dignity Trust counts 66 jurisdictions on a broader basis that includes non-UN-member territories.

Which countries have the death penalty for same-sex acts?

It is legally prescribed in Brunei, Mauritania, Iran, Nigeria (12 provinces), Saudi Arabia, Uganda and Yemen. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia and the United Arab Emirates, ILGA records no full legal certainty.

Does an employer have a legal duty to brief LGBTQ+ staff before international travel?

Duty of care obligations vary by jurisdiction and no international standard addresses LGBTQ+ travellers specifically. ISO 31030:2021 sets the general travel risk management expectation, and most large employers apply it to identity-based risk as a matter of policy rather than legal requirement. This article is not legal advice; take advice on your own jurisdictions.

Should we simply refuse to operate in criminalising countries?

Few multinationals can, and withdrawal is not obviously better for LGBTQ+ people living there. The workable position is that operating in a jurisdiction is a business decision, while sending a particular individual there is a safety decision, and the two should not be made by the same person at the same meeting.

Where to start

Global mobility is the point where inclusion policy meets a border, and it exposes whether the policy was ever structural. If you want a read on that before you rewrite anything, our Active Allyship Index scores your organisation out of eighty in about twelve minutes, and its risk-and-response dimension is where mobility failures usually show up first. It pairs with our guide to collecting LGBTQ+ self-ID data — the two are connected, because most employers who run self-ID exclude criminalising jurisdictions from it, and have to decide where that line falls.

myGwork is the global business community for LGBTQ+ professionals, graduates, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Figures in this article are cited to ILGA World, the Human Dignity Trust, Human Rights Watch and Open For Business, with the date of each source given in the text.