Fact check: Which country is the safest in Europe?

A person successful Spain's ruling party, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), precocious claimed that the state is 1 of the safest successful the satellite during a plenary league successful the little location of the Spanish parliament.

Justice Minister Félix Bolaños criticised Miguel Tellado, a Spanish MP and subordinate of the blimpish People's Party (Partido Popular), for the connection helium utilized successful parliament portion attacking the authorities for alleged corruption. He said it was borrowed consecutive from the far-right Vox party.

"You don't realise that the underlying connection of your speech, identifying migration with crime, talking astir an illegitimate government, talking astir a nationalist information occupation successful our country, which is 1 of the countries with the highest nationalist information ratings successful the world... you don't realise that your code lone serves to inflame the acold right," Bolaños said successful the heated exchange.

To verify the validity of his claims astir the information of Spain and however the remainder of Europe compares, we tin instrumentality a look astatine antithetic indices, specified arsenic the Global Peace Index, produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace.

It measures the levels of societal information and security, the grade of home and planetary conflict, and the grade of militarisation successful a fixed country. The little the score, the much peaceful a country.

In its 2025 edition, the scale ranked Spain arsenic the 25th safest state successful the world, retired of the 163 analysed countries.

In fact, Europe dominated the apical of the table: 4 of the apical 5 safest countries successful the satellite were European— namely Iceland, Ireland, Austria and Switzerland—and 8 European countries made the apical 10 with Portugal, Denmark, Slovenia and Finland.

Eurostat tin besides shed airy connected which European Union countries are considered the safest: One of the "quality of life" indicators that it records is carnal safety, covering rates of homicide, unit and vandalism.

In the astir caller dataset, Luxembourg had the lowest fig of recorded homicides comparative to its colonisation size and per 100,000 people, lasting astatine 0.32.

Italy (0.48), Slovenia (0.52), the Czech Republic (0.53) and Austria (0.61) came next, with Spain coming successful arsenic the sixth lowest (0.63).

The astir "dangerous" countries utilizing this metric are Latvia (4.88), Lithuania (3.54) and Estonia (2.78).

Our colleagues astatine Europe successful Motion besides precocious reported connected perceived crime, unit and vandalism successful people's neighbourhoods, based connected Eurostat data.

Here, Croatia, Lithuania and Poland are seen arsenic the safest countries, based connected citizens' experiences. Only 1.4% of Croatian citizens reported immoderate anti-social activity, compared to 20.9% successful Greece, the highest rate.

While Spain does person immoderate of the worst rates erstwhile looking astatine these peculiar figures (13.6%), it's inactive existent that it is mostly among the safest countries successful the world.

Nevertheless, a briefing published successful February by the European Parliamentary Research Group noted that "violence by criminals progressive successful organised transgression is expanding successful the EU, successful presumption of frequency, severity, visibility and impact."

"Even though Europe is inactive 1 of the continents slightest affected by organised crime, transgression networks are expected to summation their planetary reach, go much fluid and digitalised, and frankincense much unfastened to diverseness and competition," it added, noting that the EU has already taken measures to crook the tide, specified arsenic introducing caller ineligible and investigative frameworks to tackle violence.