Five EU governments are systematically dismantling the rule of law. The rest are watching.
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The ballot papers were still being counted in Rome when Giorgia Meloni posted a video to social media. She looked steady. She had prepared for this. Italian voters had just rejected her judicial reform by roughly 54 to 46 per cent, on a turnout nobody had forecast. ‘The Italians have decided,’ she said. ‘And we respect this decision.’ It was 23 March 2026. Behind her, the apparatus of a government that the Civil Liberties Union for Europe classifies as a ‘dismantler’ of democratic standards kept running.
The referendum had asked whether to split the career paths of judges and prosecutors, divide the Superior Council of the Judiciary into two bodies selected by lottery and create a new disciplinary court. The government said the changes were essential for impartiality. Opponents said they would hollow out an already strained judiciary. Among those opponents: 117 constitutional scholars, three presidents emeriti of the Constitutional Court and Giorgio Parisi, the Nobel laureate physicist. Meloni’s justice minister, Carlo Nordio, had called the existing system a ‘para-Mafia mechanism’. His chief of staff, Giusi Bartolozzi, had talked about ‘getting rid of’ magistrates who operated like ‘execution squads’. Voters heard all of it. They voted no.
A week later, the Liberties 2026 Rule of Law Report landed on desks across Brussels. Eight hundred pages. Nearly forty rights organisations in twenty-two member states. The findings read less like a warning than an inventory of damage already done.
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Liberties sorts EU governments into four categories. ‘Dismantlers’ are those actively pulling apart rule-of-law institutions: Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Italy and Slovakia. ‘Sliders’ are traditionally strong democracies where standards are weakening without an overarching political strategy: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Malta and Sweden. ‘Stagnators’ are countries going neither forward nor backwards: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Spain. Latvia alone got the ‘hard worker’ label.
The labels matter less than what sits underneath them. Of all recommendations issued by the European Commission in its own 2025 rule-of-law report, 93 per cent were repetitions from previous years, many copied word for word. Of the 100 recommendations that Liberties assessed, 61 showed zero progress. Thirteen were going backwards. New recommendations had halved since 2024. ‘The Commission’s report was meant to prompt concrete action,’ said Ilina Neshikj, Liberties’ executive director. Seven editions in, the concrete has not set.
The steepest decline in 2025 fell on the ‘checks and balances’ pillar: the ability of NGOs and civil society to organise and hold governments to account. In Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s sixteen years in power face an unprecedented electoral challenge on 12 April, Pride events were banned by law in March 2025. The legislation authorised police to use facial recognition on participants. More than 100,000 people marched in Budapest on 28 June anyway. The mayor, Gergely Karácsony, was put under investigation and later charged. The organiser of the Pécs Pride faces up to a year in prison.
In Italy, a security decree criminalised road blockades and strengthened guarantees for police. In Slovakia, Fico’s government dissolved the Special Prosecutor’s Office and the National Crime Agency. It gutted whistleblower protections badly enough to trigger an ad hoc procedure from the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption body. In every measured area, justice, anti-corruption, media freedom, civil-society checks, the rule of law had regressed under Fico. Attacks on journalists worsened in Bulgaria, Croatia, Italy, the Netherlands. In Slovakia, the deterioration was sharpest of all.
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France sits in the ‘slider’ category. It has not arrived at the Orbán model. The political rhetoric, though, is heading somewhere familiar.
In March 2025, a Paris court convicted Marine Le Pen of embezzlement and barred her from standing in the next presidential election. She went on television to denounce a ‘tyranny of judges’ and a ‘political assassination’. The presiding judge received death threats; someone published her home address on social media. Six months later, Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to five years for criminal conspiracy in a scheme to finance his 2007 campaign with Libyan funds. He called the decision one ‘of extreme gravity in regard to the rule of law’. ‘Hatred truly knows no bounds,’ he said. France’s justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, visited him in prison. French magistrates were less sympathetic.
The Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature, the body charged with maintaining judicial independence, responded publicly. It is ‘not acceptable in a democracy’ for judges to be threatened, it said, or for politicians to comment on individual prosecutions and sentences. The magistrates’ union warned of an ‘assault on the entire justice system’ and compared the trend to what has happened in Hungary. Magali Lafourcade, one of France’s most senior magistrates, was blunt: when a hardline interior minister calls the rule of law ‘neither untouchable nor sacred’, and a justice minister rejects rulings from European courts, ‘we have passed a number of tipping points’.
Lafourcade landed in the middle of transatlantic friction last year when officials from the Trump administration tried to lobby her against the Le Pen election ban. ‘Look at the US right now,’ she said, ‘and ask if tomorrow we want an independent judiciary or not. When a regime tips into the arbitrary and the authoritarian, it can happen fast.’
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Tearing things down is quicker than putting them back. Donald Tusk’s government was elected in 2023 to restore what Law and Justice (PiS) had spent eight years dismantling. His coalition lacks the three-fifths majority to override a presidential veto. In 2025, his presidential candidate lost to Karol Nawrocki, a national-conservative backed by PiS. The reform process stalled. Last November, the new president refused to approve the appointment of 46 judges.
Then there is Zbigniew Ziobro, PiS’s former justice minister, the man who designed the judiciary overhaul in the first place. Wanted on 26 charges, among them leading a criminal group, abuse of power and approving the unlawful purchase of Pegasus spyware, Ziobro fled to Budapest in late 2025. Orbán’s government granted him political asylum in January 2026 and amended domestic law to block the surrender of recognised refugees under a European Arrest Warrant. A Warsaw court has ordered Ziobro’s arrest. He is still in Budapest.
One EU member state sheltering a fugitive from another’s courts, on grounds of ‘political persecution’, has no real precedent in the bloc’s history. Hungary is saying, in effect, that Poland’s judiciary cannot be trusted. This is the same Poland that has been trying for two years to repair the damage Ziobro himself inflicted on judicial independence. Péter Magyar, the Hungarian opposition leader polling fifteen points ahead of Orbán, has said he would extradite Ziobro on day one. ‘But I think they’re either going to go to Minsk or Moscow,’ he added. ‘There might be someone else on the plane too.’
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Queer communities feel the rule of law in their daily lives in ways that the Liberties taxonomy does not quite capture. When judicial independence weakens and constitutional courts get packed and legislatures fast-track bills at midnight, the people who lose legal protection first are those who had the least of it to begin with. The ‘checks and balances’ pillar, the one declining fastest, contains the right to peaceful assembly and the ability of civil-society groups to challenge discriminatory legislation. Remove those and queer people are left with rhetoric. No remedy.
In Hungary, the March 2025 Pride ban was only the headline. In April, parliament went further: a constitutional amendment elevated ‘child protection’ above nearly all other fundamental rights, including freedom of assembly. It also defined gender as biological sex at birth, erasing trans identities from the constitutional order altogether. The 2021 law banning LGBT content for minors, which the EU took to the Court of Justice, now sits inside a constitutional fortress. Facial recognition at Pride. Criminal charges against a sitting mayor for walking in a march. A year in prison for a man who organised one in Pécs. None of this sits outside the rule-of-law crisis. It is the rule-of-law crisis.
Slovakia followed close behind. On 26 September 2025, Fico’s parliament amended the constitution to recognise only two sexes, male and female, defined at birth. Adoption was restricted to married heterosexual couples. Surrogacy was banned. The state claimed sovereignty over ‘cultural and ethical issues’, a language broad enough to override EU law on equality and non-discrimination. Fico called it ‘a dam against progressivism’. The Council of Europe’s Venice Commission warned that enshrining a strict binary in the constitution could be used to justify discrimination in future legislation. Amnesty International said Slovakia had moved closer to the authoritarian models of Hungary and Russia. Trans, non-binary and intersex people in Slovakia woke up to find themselves written out of their own constitution.
In Italy, the security decree that criminalised road blockades has been used against climate and pro-Palestine protesters, but it also tightened the space in which any minority group can visibly dissent. Meloni’s government abolished the crime of abuse of office, one of the few tools available to challenge institutional discrimination, and the EU’s own new equality strategy stopped short of naming Hungary or Italy by name, prompting ILGA-Europe’s advocacy director to note that the ambition was ‘noticeably lower’ than its predecessor. When the Commission cannot bring itself to identify which governments are targeting queer citizens, the 93 per cent of repeated recommendations stops looking like bureaucratic inertia. It starts looking like diplomatic cover.
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The Liberties report turned on the EU institutions, too. In 2025, they had ‘normalised the use of exceptional, fast-track lawmaking, rolled back key fundamental rights protections, and led a concerted campaign against watchdog organisations’. The referee fouling other players. ‘For their Rule of Law Report to have a real impact,’ said Kersty McCourt, Liberties’ senior advocacy adviser, ‘the EU needs a stronger, more focused approach: systematic reporting, clear recommendations with measurable benchmarks, and consistent steps to trigger legal or other action when countries fail to comply.’
In Rome, the referendum defeat has weakened Meloni. It has not removed her. She has pledged to serve out her mandate until 2027, and nobody in her coalition has broken ranks. The judiciary survives intact. For now. But what she reached for, the confrontation with the courts, the slow squeeze on dissent, the public contempt for magistrates, is the same thing Orbán has been doing for sixteen years, and Fico picked up at speed and PiS buried so deep into Polish institutions that Tusk, two and a half years on, still cannot dig it out. None of it requires a referendum. A security decree here, an agency dissolved there. A judge mocked on the evening news. A prosecutor’s home address leaked online. Year after year, the Commission sends the same recommendations in the same wording, and year after year, governments bin them. Ninety-three per cent repeated. Sixty-one per cent ignored. You do not need to be fast. You just need to keep going.
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The Liberties Rule of Law Report 2026 was released on 30 March 2026 and is available at liberties.eu.
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