Bulgaria

In 1968, Bulgaria, through its enactment of a new criminal code, decriminalized same-sex relations. Anti-discrimination laws that were put into place in 2004 protected against “direct” and “indirect” discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The laws provided for equal protection in access to housing, education, and medication. In 2015, amendments to the anti-discrimination laws expanded protections based on “sex,” including “sex change.”

Article 46 of the Bulgarian constitution prohibits same-sex marriage, restricting the right to marriage to “men and women.” Bulgaria, a state party to the European Convention on Human Rights, faced a challenge in September 2023 on its duty to protect the family and private lives of its people, as its domestic laws do not contain any procedure for the recognition of same-sex marriages. In the case of Koilova and Babulkova v. Bulgaria, Bulgaria was found to be in violation of its obligations to respect family life and privacy. However, increasingly anti-LGBTIQ social attitudes create an environment that makes the enforcement of its obligations difficult in practice. 

In 2023, the Bulgarian Supreme Court ruled that transgender people would no longer be able to change their legal names and gender markers. It explicitly banned “the change of the data regarding the sex, name, and uniform civil status in the acts of civil status of an applicant who claims to be transgender.“ This ruling contravenes the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights in Y.T. v. Bulgaria in 2020, which found Bulgaria in violation of the right to privacy and family life with the failure of its domestic courts to grant accessible legal gender recognition to its applicants. 

In 2024, Parliament introduced a draft law resembling Russian-style laws banning “foreign” funding for organizations, branding them “foreign agents,” restricting their freedom of association, and stigmatizing working with international movements. In the same year, Bulgaria also adopted a law amending the Pre-School and School Education Act to prohibit “carrying out propaganda, promotion or incitement in any way, directly or indirectly, of ideas and views related to non-traditional sexual orientation and/or the definition of gender identity other than biological one.” Bulgarian anti-LGBTIQ laws are emerging rapidly and in violation of its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, earning criticisms from the Council of Europe in 2024.

Organizations such as Reclaim have reported that in 2025, far-right parties in Bulgaria are aiming to pass two bills that seek to ban “displays of LGBTIQ content” in public, also utilizing the language of protecting children, while on the same breadth, criminalizing medical professionals that provide gender-affirming care to transgender teenagers. The second bill aims to target legal gender recognition and to amend the Personal Documents Act to statutorily prohibit access to legal gender recognition. This bill aims to codify the regressive decision created by the Bulgarian Supreme Court in 2023 in Decision No. 2/2020, which declared that the Bulgarian domestic legal framework does not enable the courts to change the data on the civil status register regarding the sex, the name, and personal identification number of transgender people.  

*Outright research indicates that the bodily autonomy of intersex people is not respected and protected in this country.