Guyana moved from ‘Partly Free’ to ‘Free’ in the 2007 Freedom in the World index, a part of the Washington D.C.-based Freedom House’s Annual Global Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties released on January 17.
The 2006 report, released last year, had stated that Guyana’s political rights and civil liberties ratings declined 2 to 3, and its status from ‘Free’ to ‘Partly Free’, “due to the government’s failure to fully investigate the emergence of anti-crime death squads and the growing influence of the illegal narcotics trade on the country’s political system.”
In other improvements, Haiti and Nepal moved from ‘Not Free’ to ‘Partly Free’. Two countries, Thailand and Congo (Brazzaville) moved from ‘Partly Free’ to ‘Not Free’, the report said.
The report said that on a global scale the state of freedom in 2006 showed a modest decline from that of 2005. “The number of countries that experienced negative changes in freedom without meriting a status change outweighed those that received positive changes: the score for 33 declined, while only 18 improved,” a press release accompanying the report said.
It said that several of the countries that showed a decline during the year were already among the world’s most repressive states: Burma, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Eritrea and Iran. “Yet declines were also noted in a number of countries rated ‘Free’ or ‘Partly Free’ but whose democratic institutions remained uninformed or fragile, as well as in societies that had previously demonstrated a strong measure of democratic stability: South Africa, Kenya, Taiwan, Philippines, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Hungary,” it said.
“While the past year was not a good year for freedom, the trend over the past decade is even more disturbing,” said Arch Puddington, director of research at Freedom House. “Not only have we failed to make significant breakthroughs, but we have seen the emergence of authoritarian regimes – Russia, Venezuela, and Iran are good examples – that are aggressively hostile to democracy, are determined to crush all domestic advocates for freedom, and stand as models for democracy adversaries everywhere,” he said.
According to Freedom House, a ‘Free’ country is one where there is broad scope for open political competition, a climate of respect for civil liberties, significant independent civic life, and independent media.
It defined a ‘Partly Free’ country as being one in which there is limited respect for political rights and civil liberties. ‘Partly Free’ states frequently suffer from an environment of corruption, weak rule of law, ethnic and religious strife, and often a setting in which a single political party enjoys dominance despite the fa?e of limited pluralism.
A ‘Not Free’ country, Freedom House said, is one where basic political rights are absent, and basic civil liberties are widely and systematically denied.
According to Freedom House, the number of countries judged by Freedom in the World as ‘Free’ in 2006 stood at 90, representing 47 per cent of the world’s 193 polities and 3,004,990,000 people – 46 per cent of the global population. Freedom House said that the number of ‘Free’ countries increased by one since the previous survey for the year 2005.
The group said that the number of countries qualifying as ‘Partly Free’ stood at 58, or 30 per cent of all countries assessed by the survey, with 1,083,000,000 people living in ‘Partly Free’ societies, 17 per cent of the world’s total. The number of ‘Partly Free’ countries did not change from the previous year, Freedom House said.
Forty-five countries were judged ‘Not Free’, representing 23 per cent of the total polities, it added. The number of people living under ‘Not Free’ conditions stood at 2,448,600,000 – 37 per cent of the world “although it is important to note that about one-half of this number lives in just one country: China.” The report said that the number of ‘Not Free’ countries did not change from 2005.
