Active dismantling and cumulative decline are hallmarks of the state of the rule of law across large parts of the EU and increasingly within European institutions themselves, according to the latest report from the Civil Liberties Union for Europe.
“The overarching finding of the 2026 report follows a similar pattern to previous years: democracy is still in decline, and Member States aren’t compelled to act on the [European] Commission’s recommendations,” it said.
The “Liberties Rule of Law Report 2026”, a collaboration of nearly 40 rights groups from 22 EU countries coordinated by Liberties, assessed how well governments respected the rule of law over the previous year by documenting their efforts across four thematic areas: justice, corruption, media freedom, and checks and balances.
Based on their progress addressing the rule of law breaches raised in last year’s report, Liberties said countries were assessed according to four pathways: “Hard Worker”, “Stagnator”, “Slider” and “Dismantler”.
The most egregious underminers of the rule of law were in the latter category and comprised Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Italy and Slovakia. These countries, the report said, are actively eroding rule-of-law institutions, with four of them showing no change from last year.
Hungary under Viktor Orban “remains in a category of its own”, it said, continuing to pursue ever more regressive laws and policies without any sign of change in the lead-up to the general election on April 12. In Slovakia, since Robert Fico won back power in 2023, the government has “moved beyond a period of ‘sliding’ standards into a phase of structural deconstruction of the checks and balances that underpin a liberal democracy.”
10 countries remained stuck in the Stagnator category with no meaningful progress in either direction, namely the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Spain. Latvia was the only country designated as a Hard Worker.
In this year’s report, Liberties focused on the scale of repeated and unimplemented recommendations from the European Commission – which began its “Rule of Law Reports” in 2020 in response to democratic backsliding – as well as gaps, trends and new developments.
Liberties’ analysis revealed a widening implementation gap in which 93 per cent of all 2025 European Commission recommendations were repetitions from previous years. Out of 100 Commission recommendations assessed by Liberties, a total of 61 per cent showed no visible signs of progress, 13 per cent were deemed to be backsliding, while no recommendations were found to have been fully implemented.
“In the six years that have followed, not only have the [EU’s Rule of Law] reports largely failed in this objective, but the EU has deepened the rule of law challenges within its own institutions and failed to apply international law consistently in its foreign policy decisions,” it warned.
“EU institutions themselves mirrored many of the issues seen in Member States: they normalised the use of exceptional, fast-track lawmaking, rolled back key fundamental rights protections, and led a concerted campaign against watchdog organisations,” it said.