Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN
—
For nearly two decades, democracies around the world have been losing ground. Countless autocrats have managed to pulverize the foundations of democracy in their countries by passing arcane laws that quietly erode civil liberties, press freedoms or the separation of powers, to name a few examples.
A new report from the non-partisan Freedom House confirms that millions of people in dozens of countries saw their freedoms eroded last year. There were more countries that lost freedom in 2022 than those that gained it. But look closer and there are promising signs of change. The pace of decline is slowing and it’s possible that the pushback we’re seeing from protesters in places like Mexico, Israel and Georgia will reverse the trend.
Freedom House uses the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to measure individual freedom in every country, giving it a numeric score and a classification of Free, Partly Free or Not Free based on factors including press freedoms, rule of law, freedom of association and belief, free and fair elections and others.
By this measure, freedom has been declining worldwide for 17 years. Autocracy is still on the march, and democracy is still on the defensive. Nowhere is that more crassly on display than in Ukraine, a fledgling democracy defending against an unprovoked attack by its autocratic neighbor, Russia.
In most places, however, autocrats are advancing their agenda more subtly by changing the rules of the game and amassing more power for themselves. Freedom House found democracy losing ground in Tunisia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Hungary, Burkina Faso and dozens of other countries.
But there was some glimmer of good news: last year, there were 35 countries that became less free than they were the previous year — the smallest number since the most recent trend of democratic decline started in 2005. Meanwhile, nearly the same number of countries (34) saw improvements, suggesting change may be…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CNN.com – RSS Channel – HP Hero…