DUSHANBE, June 24, 2015, Asia-Plus –
Nations in Transit 2015
, released by Freedom House on June 22, notes that democratization efforts in Europe and Eurasia face new, increasingly aggressive attacks by authoritarian states and other adversaries.
Nations in Transit
is the only comprehensive, comparative, and multidimensional study of reform in the former Communist states of Europe and Eurasia.
Nations in Transit
tracks the reform record of 29 countries and administrative areas.
The 2015 ratings reflect the period January 1 through December 31, 2014.
The countries are divided into five types: consolidated democracy; semi-consolidated democracy; transitional government or hybrid regime; semi-consolidated authoritarian regime; consolidated authoritarian regime.
The democracy scores and regime ratings are based on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 representing the highest level of democratic progress and 7 the lowest.
Of the 29 countries assessed for 2014, 13 were rated as democracies, 6 as transitional regimes, and 10 as authoritarian regimes.
According to the report, as in each of the previous 10 years, the average democracy score declined in 2014, with 12 countries suffering downgrades.
Legal restrictions and government harassment targeted NGOs in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan, leading to ratings declines for civil society in all four countries, the report says
Conditions remained dire in Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—the report’s worst performers.
Tajikistan with 6.39 scores is classified as a consolidated authoritarian regime.
The report notes that democracy indicators for Tajikistan declined for the fourth consecutive year in 2014 as the government continued its sustained offensive against perceived threats, from opposition activists and their lawyers to academic researchers. The use of a pliant judiciary to mete out such harassment has reached critical levels, as have harsh conditions in Tajikistan’s prisons. At year’s end, the parliament was considering a version of the Russian law requiring certain nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to register as “foreign agents,” carbon copies of which have sprung up across the region since Moscow adopted it in 2012.
In Central Asia, the best-performing country is Kyrgyzstan, and unlike its neighbors it is not currently classified as a consolidated authoritarian regime. However, it lost ground on the civil society indicator in 2014 as the government increased restrictions on freedom of assembly and NGOs that had pushed back against illiberal legislative proposals the previous year.
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan continued to earn the report’s worst possible rating of 7 on nearly every indicator. New legislation adopted in Uzbekistan in 2014 formalized the already widespread practice of persecuting people with prior convictions through a variety of “preventative” restrictions, enforced by police and the country’s ubiquitous neighborhood committees, according to the report.
Meanwhile, Russia reportedly earned its largest ratings decline in a decade in 2014, as the Kremlin stepped up suppression of dissent at home while seeking to destabilize the new government in Ukraine.
