Repression deepened and spread
Efforts by authoritarian governments to extinguish opposition to their rule drove four countries to decline from Partly Free to Not Free in 2024. In Thailand, the Constitutional Court disbanded the Move Forward Party, an opposition group that won the most votes in the 2023 parliamentary elections, and separately toppled a prime minister from the second-ranked party. The country’s status was downgraded as a result of these actions, which amounted to a reassertion of power by the kingdom’s unelected establishment following voters’ endorsement of democratic forces a year earlier. A similar situation unfolded in Kuwait, where the emir, Sheikh Meshaal al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, responded to the election of an opposition-controlled parliament in April by indefinitely dissolving the body and ruling alone through his appointed cabinet, eliminating the people’s chosen representatives from government. Both countries declined from Partly Free to Not Free.
Niger, where the elected government was ousted by a military junta in 2023, declined to Not Free because General Abdourahamane Tchiani’s regime dissolved local councils, suspended media outlets, and denied due process to supporters of the deposed civilian leadership. Tanzania accounted for the fourth decline from Partly Free to Not Free, which came after years of deterioration in rights and liberties under President Samia Suluhu Hassan. In 2024, Tanzanian authorities used mass detention against protesters and continued efforts to forcibly evict Indigenous Maasai communities from a planned game reserve.
These negative status changes were in keeping with a broader trend that has affected Freedom in the World data for over a decade: further attacks on rights, especially freedom of expression and the rule of law, in countries where people already lacked access to many fundamental freedoms.
Of the civil liberties tracked by Freedom in the World, freedom of expression has declined the most over the last 19 years. The number of countries and territories where the indicator for freedom of the media is scored at 0 out of 4—meaning there is virtually no space for independent media to operate—has almost tripled between 2005 and 2024, rising from 13 to 34. Last year, attacks on the media in the form of censorship, arrests and imprisonment of journalists, physical and legal harassment, or violence were recorded in over 120 countries and territories.
In Hong Kong, where Beijing has tightened its control in recent years, most acts of perceived dissent, including independent journalism, have been criminalized under the repressive National Security Law (NSL). The NSL trial of Jimmy Lai, former publisher of the Apple Daily, for reports on the 2019 prodemocracy protest movement continued last year. Forty-five prodemocracy activists were also sentenced for conspiracy to commit subversion under the NSL, having helped to organize a semiformal opposition primary for legislative candidates in 2020. A foreign judge who resigned from Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal noted that local judges are under immense pressure to conform to the government’s repressive goals, which has “profoundly compromised” the rule of law in the territory.
One striking example of the way in which two harmful phenomena—attacks on the media and transnational repression—are increasingly intersecting came from Vietnam, where a Hanoi court sentenced blogger Duong Van Thai to 12 years in prison in October for social media posts and videos that criticized the Communist Party government. He had become a victim of transnational repression in 2023, when he was kidnapped from Thailand and returned to Vietnam to face charges.
Like the silencing of media workers, pressure on members of the legal profession is an increasingly common authoritarian tactic around the globe. According to Freedom in the World data, judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers have been imprisoned, detained, or charged for politically motivated reasons in at least 78 countries over the last decade. In 2024, some of the most extreme cases of such repression occurred in Russia and Belarus. In Russia, criminal trials began for the lawyers who had represented the slain opposition leader Aleksey Navalny and the journalist Ivan Safronov. In Belarus, lawyers representing political prisoners became prisoners themselves, charged with “extremism” based solely on their work.
To recognize that authoritarianism has deepened in many countries is not to say that all hope is lost. The sudden fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, more than 13 years after he touched off a civil war by brutally crushing peaceful prodemocracy protests, reminded the world that despotic control is often more fragile than it appears. Syria’s score had been among the lowest in the world, but it was tied for the second-largest improvement among countries last year as political prisoners were freed en masse and the regime’s restrictions on freedoms of movement and assembly were eased. While there are still many obstacles to a democratic future for the Syrian people, they now have an opportunity for progress that seemed unimaginable just a year earlier.
Challenges on the horizon
Three issues will likely exert an important influence on global freedom in 2025 and beyond. First, countries where new leaders emerged from contested elections last year, as in Senegal and Sri Lanka, or who took office after the collapse of authoritarian regimes, as in Bangladesh, may prove to be bright spots for democracy. But much will depend on how these governments pursue reforms, and whether they ensure that individual freedoms and the rule of law are protected and expanded in the process. Second, among a small but growing group of democracies, including Slovakia and Mexico, elected leaders are trying to undermine institutions that are meant to serve as a check on their powers, such as the media, anticorruption bodies, and the judiciary. Over time, these attacks have the potential to erode political rights and civil liberties. Finally, from Sudan to Haiti and Honduras, people are living amid extreme violence perpetrated by nonstate armed groups. These lawless forces are not only imperiling physical safety, but also undercutting freedom and serving authoritarian interests. A plan to deal with such groups will have to be part of any domestic or international effort to establish peace and security in the world’s most dangerous places.
A large number of people gather in Umayyad Square in Damascus, Syria to celebrate the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime. (Photo Credit: Juma Muhammad/Alamy Live News)
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