European Countries that Legalized Divorce in Recent Decades


European Countries -- Recently Legalized Divorce

Some European countries have legalized divorce in the past 2 or 3 decades.  The divorce rates in these countries are still very low.  Italy legalized divorce in 1970, Spain legalized divorce in 1981, Ireland legalized divorce in 1995 and Malta legalized divorce in 2011.  Only Spain has seen a dramatically large change in their divorce rate.  Ireland has seen little change.  Italy’s divorce rate has doubled.  Malta has the lowest beginning rate of divorce.

The original source of this data can be found at Eurostat– Marriage & Divorce Statistics.

2012 World Divorce Rates– Incomplete


This figure has been updated with 70 countries reporting.  Jan 2015

The United Nations has released the World Demographic Report that provides data on patterns of the world population including marriage and divorce rates.  As usual the numbers are incomplete as many countries do not report in time for this report, but the report also updates the 2011 data and these are more complete.

More world divorce charts and graphs are here…..

European Divorce Rate– 2010


There is now an updated list showing the 2012 Divorce rates for 39 European countries.

Updated, Crude Divorce Rate-- Europe 2010

The United Nations collects marriage and divorce data for the world.  This chart provides an illustration of the crude divorce rate (number of divorces per 1000 population) for European countries in 2010.  Several countries are not listed which did not report data in 2010.  The most recent crude divorce rates for these countries is as follows:  Albania, 1.1 (2008), Greece, 1.2 (2008), France, 2.0 (2009), Italy, .9 (2009), Portugal, 2.5 (2009), Great Britain,  2.0 (2009).

See the 2011 European Graph. 

More UN demographic reports: