This review deals with the determination of impurities in pharmaceuticals by electromigration methods in the capillary format. These separation methods are either based on the different effective mobility of the charged analytes (as in zone electrophoresis and isotachophoresis) or include hybrid methods such as micellar electrokinetic chromatography, microemulsion electrokinetic chromatography and electrochromatography. The pharmaceutically active compounds under consideration belong to chemotherapeutic agents, central nervous system drugs, histamine receptor drugs, cardiovascular drugs, anticancer drugs, anti-inflammatory drugs and some other drugs. The review discusses about 150 publications from the period between 1980 and 2007 with special emphasis on the recent trends and gives details about the experimental conditions applied for analyses and the obtained analytical performance parameters.