Table Of Content
We publish detailed research on more than 200 countries and territories, because accurate data and rigorous analysis are essential to shining a light on the erosion of freedom. Democracies and private sector actors should work to support core democratic principles and basic human rights at home and around the world. To reverse the global shift toward authoritarian norms, democracy advocates working for freedom in their home countries will need robust solidarity from like-minded allies abroad.
Key to Scores and Status
Meanwhile, restrictions on freedoms of expression and association have worsened over time, pushing the country’s scores deeper into the Partly Free range. The outbreak exposed weaknesses across all the pillars of democracy, from elections and the rule of law to egregiously disproportionate restrictions on freedoms of assembly and movement. Both democracies and dictatorships experienced successes and failures in their battle with the virus itself, though citizens in authoritarian states had fewer tools to resist and correct harmful policies. Ultimately, the changes precipitated by the pandemic left many societies—with varied regime types, income levels, and demographics—in worse political condition; with more pronounced racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities; and vulnerable to long-term effects. The malign influence of the regime in China, the world’s most populous dictatorship, was especially profound in 2020. Beijing ramped up its global disinformation and censorship campaign to counter the fallout from its cover-up of the initial coronavirus outbreak, which severely hampered a rapid global response in the pandemic’s early days.
Freedom House's Reporting on Transnational Repression
Treatment revolves around helping individuals stop using the substance they are addicted to and learn healthy habits to avoid relapse. During medically assisted detox, a medical professional monitors the patient and administers medication to mitigate withdrawal symptoms. With a 60-bed dormitory, the center provides many young people living on the streets a stable place to rest their heads at night. Even as Americans remain committed to the ideals of democracy, a majority see democracy in the United States as weak and getting weaker, according to a national survey jointly commissioned by Freedom House, the George W. Bush Institute, and the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
Treatment
Democracy’s advocates need to learn from the experience of 2020 and prepare for emergency responses that respect the political rights and civil liberties of all people, including the most marginalized. Multiple military figures were appointed to leading positions on the country’s COVID-19 task force, and the armed services provided essential support in developing emergency hospitals and securing medical supplies. In recent years, observers have raised concerns about the military’s growing influence over civilian governance, and its heavy involvement in the health crisis threatened to accelerate this trend.
Electoral Process
The end product represents the consensus of the analysts, outside advisers, and Freedom House staff, who are responsible for any final decisions. Although an element of subjectivity is unavoidable in such an enterprise, the ratings process emphasizes methodological consistency, intellectual rigor, and balanced and unbiased judgments. More broadly, democracy has demonstrated its adaptability under the unique constraints of a world afflicted by COVID-19. A number of successful elections were held across all regions and in countries at all income levels, including in Montenegro, and in Bolivia, yielding improvements.
Its efforts also featured increased meddling in the domestic political discourse of foreign democracies, transnational extensions of rights abuses common in mainland China, and the demolition of Hong Kong’s liberties and legal autonomy. The Trump administration in 2020 intensified its efforts to reduce the number of legal immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants entering and residing in the country. Such moves since 2017 had in many cases been hasty, uncoordinated, and underfunded, leading to implementation problems as well as conflicts with existing laws, constitutional protections, and international human rights standards. While the administration typically cited exaggerated security concerns as justification for its policies, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a new rationale and helped the administration achieve larger declines in the number of newly arriving immigrants and asylum claimants than had previously been possible. Prior to the 2020 edition, Freedom in the World assigned a country or territory two ratings—one for political rights and one for civil liberties—based on its total scores for the political rights and civil liberties questions.
Freedom House: A Sonic Bibliography - Oxford American
Freedom House: A Sonic Bibliography.
Posted: Tue, 06 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
As part of a condition of the sale, the property is now under a conservation easement with the Los Angeles Conservancy. Moon persevered, though, and eventually rose through the ranks to become chief supervisor of Pittsburgh EMS. Another Freedom House paramedic, Mitchell Brown, went on to become the director of the department of public safety for Columbus, Ohio. The US homicide rate, at 5.0 per 100,000 inhabitants as of 2019, remains low by regional and historical standards, and overall crime rates have declined since the 1990s. However, murder rates reportedly rose by more than 20 percent in the first nine months of 2020, with even higher spikes in a number of large cities. The capital district, Puerto Rico, and four overseas US territories are each represented by an elected delegate in the House who can perform most legislative functions but cannot participate in floor votes.
Write a review for Freedom Treatment Centers of California
Some highly repressive governments, including those of Turkmenistan and Nicaragua, simply ignored reality and denied the presence of the pathogen in their territory. At the presidential level and in a number of states and localities, officials in the United States obscured data and actively sowed misinformation about the transmission and treatment of the coronavirus, leading to widespread confusion and the politicization of what should have been a public health matter. Similarly, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro repeatedly downplayed the harms of COVID-19, promoted unproven treatments, criticized subnational governments’ health measures, and sowed doubt about the utility of masks and vaccines. The year leading up to the assault on the Capitol was fraught with other episodes that threw the country into the global spotlight in a new way. Even before 2020, Trump had presided over an accelerating decline in US freedom scores, driven in part by corruption and conflicts of interest in the administration, resistance to transparency efforts, and harsh and haphazard policies on immigration and asylum that made the country an outlier among its Group of Seven peers.
Early implementation of expert recommendations, the deployment of masks and other protective equipment, and efficient contact-tracing and testing efforts that prioritized transparency—combined with the country’s island geography—all helped to control the disease. Meanwhile, Beijing escalated its campaign to sway global opinion against Taiwan’s government and deny the success of its democracy, in part by successfully pressuring the World Health Organization to ignore early warnings of human-to-human transmission from Taiwan and to exclude Taiwan from its World Health Assembly. Even before the virus struck, Taiwanese voters defied a multipronged, politicized disinformation campaign from China and overwhelmingly reelected incumbent president Tsai Ing-wen, who opposes moves toward unification with the mainland. In fact, Belarus was far from the only place where the promise of increased freedom raised by mass protests eventually curdled into heightened repression. Of the 39 countries and territories where Freedom House noted major protests in 2019, 23 experienced a score decline for 2020—a significantly higher share than countries with declines represented in the world at large. In settings as varied as Algeria, Guinea, and India, regimes that protests had taken by surprise in 2019 regained their footing, arresting and prosecuting demonstrators, passing newly restrictive laws, and in some cases resorting to brutal crackdowns, for which they faced few international repercussions.
Freedom House is founded on the core conviction that freedom flourishes in democratic nations where governments are accountable to their people. We speak out against threats to democracy and empower individuals to exercise their fundamental rights through a unique combination of analysis, advocacy, and direct support to frontline defenders of freedom, especially those working in closed authoritarian societies. The United States has a deeply rooted rule-of-law tradition, and legal and constitutional protections for due process are widely observed. However, the criminal justice system suffers from a number of chronic weaknesses, many of which are tied to racial discrimination and contribute to disparities in outcomes that disadvantage people of color, particularly Black Americans. Beginning in 2017, however, the Trump administration presented a number of challenges to existing norms of government ethics and probity. Anticorruption watchdogs criticized President Trump for shifting management of his real-estate development empire to his children rather than divesting ownership or establishing a stronger structural barrier between himself and his businesses.
Also, a designation of Free does not mean that a country or territory enjoys perfect freedom or lacks serious problems, only that it enjoys comparatively more freedom than those rated Partly Free or Not Free (and some others rated Free). Freedom in the World is an annual global report on political rights and civil liberties, composed of numerical ratings and descriptive texts for each country and a select group of territories. The 2024 edition covers developments in 195 countries and 15 territories from January 1, 2023, through December 31, 2023. The Biden administration has pledged to make support for democracy a key part of US foreign policy, raising hopes for a more proactive American role in reversing the global democratic decline. To fulfill this promise, the president will need to provide clear leadership, articulating his goals to the American public and to allies overseas. He must also make the United States credible in its efforts by implementing the reforms necessary to address considerable democratic deficits at home.
A country or territory’s Freedom in the World status depends on its aggregate Political Rights score, on a scale of 0–40, and its aggregate Civil Liberties score, on a scale of 0–60. The total Political Rights and Civil Liberties scores are equally weighted in this calculation, leading to the following possible ranges. Also beginning with the 2018 edition, countries require an overall Civil Liberties score of 30 or better—in addition to a score of 7 or better in subcategory A (Electoral Process), and an overall Political Rights score of 20 or better—to qualify as an electoral democracy. Freedom House does not believe that legal guarantees of rights are sufficient for on-the-ground fulfillment of those rights. While both laws and actual practices are factored into scoring decisions, greater emphasis is placed on implementation. Safar had been advocating, without much luck, to provide medical training to ambulance workers when Hallen approached him with the idea of starting a private ambulance service in Pittsburgh’s Hill District — a predominantly African American area composed of various low-income, inner-city neighborhoods.
Raymond Gastil, a Harvard-trained specialist in regional studies from the University of Washington in Seattle, developed the methodology, which assigned political rights and civil liberties ratings to 151 countries and 45 territories and categorized them as Free, Partly Free, or Not Free. The findings appeared each year in Freedom House’s bimonthly journal Freedom at Issue (later titled Freedom Review). Freedom in the World first appeared in book form in 1978 and included short narratives for each country and territory rated in the study, as well as a series of essays by leading scholars on related issues. Freedom in the World continued to be produced by Gastil until 1989, when a larger team of in-house analysts was established. In the mid-1990s, the expansion of the country and territory narratives necessitated the hiring of outside analysts—a group of regional experts from the academic, media, and human rights communities—and the project has continued to grow in size and scope in the years since.
It has offices in a number of countries, where it promotes and assists local human rights workers and non-government organizations. The Freedom in the World report is composed of numerical ratings and supporting descriptive texts for 195 countries and 15 territories. External analysts assess 210 countries and territories, using a combination of on-the-ground research, consultations with local contacts, and information from news articles, nongovernmental organizations, governments, and a variety of other sources. Since 2007, we have assisted tens of thousands of activists, victims of human rights abuses, and their families across 150 countries by providing support for urgent needs like relocation, legal representation, trial monitoring, technical equipment, medical and living expenses, and other life-saving services.
No comments:
Post a Comment