The Growing Shadow of Autocracy

Key Findings

Global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025. A total of 54 countries experienced deterioration in their political rights and civil liberties during the year, while only 35 countries registered improvements. Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Madagascar, and El Salvador had the largest one-year  score declines, while Syria, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, and Gabon recorded the largest gains. Three countries—Bolivia, Fiji, and Malawi—improved from Partly Free to Free status thanks to competitive elections, growing judicial independence, and the strengthening of the rule of law.

Among countries rated Free, the United States, Bulgaria, and Italy have experienced the year’s largest declines. In the United States, an escalation in both legislative dysfunction and executive dominance, growing pressure on people’s ability to engage in free expression, and the new administration’s moves to undermine anticorruption safeguards all contributed to the negative score change. The United States lost 3 points on the report’s 100-point scale, bringing its net decline since 2005 to 12 points, more than any other country rated Free during the same period except for Nauru and Bulgaria.

Although many rights and liberties have been diminished over the last two decades, media freedom, freedom of personal expression, and due process have suffered the heaviest impacts. Coups, armed conflicts, attacks on democratic institutions by elected leaders, and intensified repression by authoritarian regimes have been the main drivers of deterioration during this 20-year period.

Since 2005, the group of countries with Partly Free status has shrunk substantially. Nineteen Partly Free countries have dropped to Not Free, swelling the ranks of the world’s autocracies, which have become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad. Democratic governments have long worked together to counter the spread of authoritarian rule. But in recent years, European countries have sharply reduced their funding for foreign democracy aid. And in 2025, the US administration abruptly canceled most foreign aid programs, began to disengage from international organizations, and refrained from condemning fraudulent elections—effectively abandoning long-standing principles of its foreign policy. As democracies move further away from their traditional role as defenders of freedom, the world could face a dangerous future led by emboldened autocrats.

Most democracies remain resilient in the face of daunting challenges. Despite internal pressures and threats from foreign powers, democracies continue to demonstrate that their domestic political systems are responsive and capable of course correction. Of the 87 countries rated Free in 2005, a total of 76—more than 85 percent—have remained Free throughout the two-decade period of global decline. Moreover, new democracies have repeatedly taken root under difficult circumstances, and aspirations for democracy routinely find popular support in even the most repressive environments.

In Georgia, large-scale antigovernment protests that began in 2024 continued throughout 2025, even as demonstrators faced disproportionate force and ill-treatment from the police. Opponents of the ruling party, Georgian Dream, experienced physical assaults, harassment, and new legal restrictions aimed at hindering the participation of opposition parties and civil society in public affairs. The country’s score declined by 4 points. Serbia lost 3 points after authorities retaliated against teachers and professors who participated in widespread, student-led anticorruption protests by withholding pay and employment contracts. At the same time, police used excessive force against protesters and failed to protect them from armed gangs.

In the world’s worst-performing countries, where the scores on many indicators have already hit 0, armed conflict and authoritarian repression generated profound human rights violations. The ongoing conflict in Sudan between the regular Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has led to the deaths of thousands of civilians. Sudan’s score fell to just 1 out of 100 in the wake of mass killings, sexual violence, and forcible displacement of non-Arab civilians as the RSF seized control of the city of El Fasher. Myanmar’s score was reduced by 3 points—to just 4 out of 100—after the military junta, which has been fighting a brutal civil war against popular resistance forces and ethnic minority militias since it seized power in a 2021 coup, banned criticism of its tightly controlled election plans and imposed other restrictions on political participation ahead of the first round of voting in December. Conditions for freedom continued to deteriorate in Iran, with authorities arresting more than 21,000 people as part of a crackdown on alleged espionage and collaboration following the regime’s 12-day war with Israel in June. Security forces also expelled approximately 1.8 million Afghan migrants and refugees over the course of the year, including many who were born in Iran and thousands of unaccompanied children, without due process or protections for their basic rights. The campaign drove the country’s score down by 1 point to 10 out of 100.

The scores for Russia and China remained unchanged at 12 and 9 out of 100, respectively, but Moscow and Beijing took further steps to suppress perceived dissent. As the Kremlin continued its full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine for a fourth year, Russian authorities prosecuted a growing number of people at home for their antiwar speech and activism. In January 2025, two media outlets were designated as terrorist organizations for the first time. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continued to exert significant control over people’s political rights and civil liberties in China, prosecuting journalists, cracking down on small but multiplying protests, and constraining international travel. Activist and citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, for example, was sentenced to four years in prison in September after being released from another prison term the previous year.

Among countries rated Free, Bulgaria, Italy, and the United States registered the largest declines. Bulgaria lost 3 points amid continued fallout from 2024 parliamentary elections that were marred by vote buying and fraud. At the end of 2025, the coalition government brought to power through those elections was forced to resign in the face of mass protests against corruption. In Italy, the national government weakened anticorruption safeguards even as reports emerged of corruption among regional politicians. This development, along with state efforts to restrict the work of migration-focused nongovernmental organizations, led to a 2-point decline.

In the United States, the decline in freedom stemmed from a combination of long-term patterns and recent developments. There was an intensification of chronic partisan gridlock and dysfunction in Congress, including a funding impasse that culminated in the longest government shutdown in US history. The growing legislative paralysis was accompanied by a parallel escalation in the executive branch’s assertions of unilateral authority. Separately, a multiyear rise in threats and reprisals for political speech as well as government efforts to punish nonviolent expression by noncitizens produced a chilling effect on personal expression more broadly. The new presidential administration also disregarded conflicts of interest and weakened both anticorruption safeguards and enforcement practices. As a result of these factors, the country’s score declined by 3 points, for a net loss of 12 points over the last 20 years—more than any other country rated Free during the same period, except for Nauru and Bulgaria.

Despite the global negative trend, there were some positive developments in 2025. Three countries—Bolivia, Fiji, and Malawi—were upgraded from Partly Free to Free, entering that status for the first time in the last two decades. These status changes were driven by competitive national elections as well as growing judicial independence and strengthening of the rule of law. Sri Lanka continued to make gains after the 2024 presidential election, receiving a 5-point improvement as the new government worked to combat corruption and promote religious tolerance. Although both Syria and Gabon remained Not Free as they recovered from decades of dynastic authoritarian rule, their new leaders oversaw modest progress in the rebuilding of political institutions and the loosening of restrictions on basic rights, contributing to score increases of 5 and 4 points, respectively.

No longer Partly Free

More than 85 percent of the countries rated Free as of 2005 remained Free 20 years later, and 71 percent of those rated Not Free as of 2005 have remained Not Free. Yet fewer than half of the Partly Free countries as of 2005 have retained that status. Disproving predictions made in the early 2000s about global momentum toward political liberalization, Partly Free countries have in fact been far less likely to consolidate their democracies and much more likely to experience substantial deterioration in freedoms. Just nine countries—Bolivia, Colombia, Fiji, Guyana, Malawi, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, and Tonga—improved from Partly Free at some point in the last 20 years and remain Free today. Meanwhile, 19 countries moved in the opposite direction, falling from Partly Free to Not Free. Outside of armed conflicts and coups, these transformations were mostly driven by illiberal leaders who experimented with the tactics for eroding democracy that are increasingly being employed around the world.

Nicaragua and Venezuela are illustrative cases of how a weak democracy can be distorted and remolded into an outright autocracy. In both settings, presidents who had won relatively competitive elections in the past went on to oversee dramatic deteriorations in political rights and civil liberties, bringing all branches of government and state institutions under their control and violently suppressing political dissent through arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial killings, and torture.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s long push for autocratic power was punctuated by a bloody episode in 2018, when the army, police, and paramilitary groups quashed mass antigovernment protests that began in response to social security reforms, killing over 300 people and injuring more than 2,000. Since then, Ortega and his wife, now-Copresident Rosario Murillo, have further consolidated their rule with constitutional reforms that explicitly ended the separation of powers and crackdowns on independent media, civil society, and the political opposition. Many of the regime’s perceived foes have been arbitrarily detained, forced into exile, and stripped of their Nicaraguan citizenship in recent years.

Venezuela began its democratic decline before Nicolás Maduro took power in 2013, having dropped from Free to Partly Free in 1999 under his predecessor, President Hugo Chávez. The decline dramatically accelerated under Maduro, however, as the population similarly faced violent responses to numerous antigovernment protests, including attacks by state-affiliated armed groups and widespread detentions and prosecutions for expressions of dissent. A subservient judiciary, a legislature stripped of its constitutional functions, and a co-opted electoral council that facilitated a fraudulent presidential vote in 2024 all contributed to the deprivation of Venezuelans’ fundamental freedoms. Maduro himself was suddenly removed from power by US forces in early 2026, but it was not immediately clear how this might affect his regime or the country’s future trajectory.

Nicaragua and Venezuela were downgraded from Partly Free to Not Free in 2018 and 2016, respectively, losing 49 and 41 points over the last 20 years. Due largely to the illiberal rule of their leaders, the two countries experienced the second and third largest declines in Freedom in the World since 2005.

Drivers of the deterioration

While no single cause can explain the two-decade deterioration in global freedom, Freedom House data point to four factors that have presented the greatest threats to democracy and human rights: violence and armed conflict, coups d’état, erosion of democratic institutions, and escalating repression by autocrats.

Violence and armed conflict endanger people’s physical safety and destroy the foundations of a state. Military coups, which have been on the rise in recent years, typically start by upending all political institutions; in the long run, however, military rulers tend to expand their repression to reach broader sections of society, making a return to elected civilian government more difficult. The gradual erosion of democracy is less obvious and shocking than wars or coups, but tactics such as the manipulation of elections or the undermining of judicial independence are also extremely damaging to freedom. Even in existing autocracies, regimes must work constantly to suppress recurrent demands for basic rights and ride out the many crises associated with their own misrule, and these downward spirals have contributed significantly to the global decline of the past 20 years.

Violence and armed conflict

Violence and armed conflict directly jeopardize physical safety, but they also undermine many other fundamental freedoms, including freedom of movement and property rights. Women and members of ethnic and religious minority groups tend to be disproportionally affected by conflicts, and in some cases they are deliberately attacked. As conflicts drag on, they often spill across borders, attract foreign mercenaries or interventions, and make it extremely difficult for the country to create or rebuild democratic institutions.

Violence and armed conflict have contributed to some of the largest score declines of the last 20 years, including in the Central African Republic (CAR), Ethiopia, and Ukraine. Yemen’s score has dropped by 21 points since 2005, with most of the deterioration occurring during a devastating civil war that began in 2015, after Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized control of the capital. Saudi forces launched a military campaign against the Houthis to support Yemen’s internationally recognized government, which was led by a close ally of Saudi Arabia. Governance of the country has since been fractured between the warring parties, most state institutions have ceased to function, civilian political activity has been halted, and elections are long overdue.

While active fighting in Yemen had largely subsided in recent years, little progress has been made in peace negotiations, and recent clashes involving southern separatists backed by the United Arab Emirates threatened to plunge the country back into acute conflict. Even civil wars seldom remain confined to one country; fighting may become entangled with other regional conflicts, such as when the Houthis and the Israeli military exchanged missile and drone strikes during the war between Israel and Hamas that began in October 2023. More often, conflicts drive migration across borders as people seek safety from violence. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled Yemen, and in 2025 some 4.5 million people were still internally displaced as a result of the conflict.

Decades of fighting between armed nonstate actors, foreign mercenary groups, and government forces in the CAR have led to chronic insecurity, persistent political instability, and serious rights abuses. The country descended into a brutal civil conflict in 2013 after the Séléka rebel group seized the capital and ousted the government. The conflict featured targeted violence against Muslim and Christian civilians by the respective warring parties, who ultimately took control of large swaths of the country and rendered the government powerless in the areas under their control. Women and girls were subjected to sexual violence by armed groups as well as UN peacekeepers. As a result, the country’s scores for political rights and civil liberties plummeted, and the CAR’s status changed from Partly Free to Not Free for the events of 2013.

In both Yemen and the CAR, the rebuilding of governing institutions has been severely hindered by the power and influence of foreign and nonstate actors as well as the central government’s lack of control over its own territory. While the 2016 election of President Faustin Archange Touadéra in the CAR helped the government regain control of the capital city, and the overall level of violence fell compared with 2013, most of the country was still subject to a fractured array of armed groups. The CAR has grown more authoritarian in recent years and remains one of the least free places in the world, scoring only 5 points out of 100 for 2025.

Military coups

Coups occur when the incumbent government or constitutional system is illegally overthrown and executive power is seized, often by a small group of military or political elites. When coup leaders use their unchecked power over the political system to entrench themselves through institutional changes, there can be long-term effects on a country’s ability to return to democratic governance.

After years of democratic progress in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a 2012 military coup in Mali resulted in the swift dismantling of the country’s democratic institutions and subsequent repression of civil liberties. The coup set Mali on a path of persistent crisis and conflict, and its status declined from Free to Not Free that year, swiftly bypassing the Partly Free category. Mali suffered two additional coups in 2020 and 2021, and since then the military has cemented its power by capturing state institutions and repeatedly postponing elections.

Freedom in Mali declined even further in 2025, when the military regime dissolved all political parties and enacted a law that effectively allowed its president to extend his term indefinitely. As a result of this long period of largely military rule, and the effects of complex armed insurgencies, the country has suffered the world’s single largest score decline over the last 20 years, dropping by a total of 53 points.

Mali provides just one example of the lasting damage done by military coups. Conditions in several countries, including Burkina Faso and Niger, continued to deteriorate in 2025 after a wave of military coups beginning in 2019 toppled governments across the Sahel and West Africa. In Burkina Faso, two back-to-back military coups in 2022 tore down the significant political reforms and development of democratic institutions that had been implemented after a transition from the longtime rule of President Blaise Compaoré in 2015. In Niger, which had experienced its first transfer of power between democratically elected presidents in 2020–21, the military toppled the civilian government in 2023.

In both countries, freedom continued to decline in the years following the coups, as the junta leaders acted unilaterally to consolidate power and used increasingly violent methods to suppress dissent. In Burkina Faso, the military regime postponed elections indefinitely, contributing to a 5-point decline in 2025. In Niger, the military dissolved all political parties during the year, effectively stamping out any remaining alternative to the junta’s rule and helping to drive the score down by 3 points.

The damage a military coup causes to a country’s institutions also leaves them more susceptible to future coups. Thailand has experienced over 20 coups or attempted coups since the country emerged from absolute monarchical rule in the 1930s, and like Mali, it has registered one of the world’s largest declines over the last two decades as a result of a military coup in 2014. While the country transitioned to a semielected government in 2019, its unelected authorities—including the military, the judiciary, and the monarchy—continue to exert decisive influence over political affairs. Myanmar has a similarly long history of military influence over politics, and its 2021 military coup not only derailed a struggling transition from military dictatorship to democracy, but also plunged the country into a renewed and expanded civil war.

Erosion of democratic institutions

Democratic institutions such as free and fair elections, independent legislatures and courts, and strong anticorruption agencies serve to facilitate public participation and representation, protect individual rights, and place checks on those in power. The erosion of these features of democracy, while typically gradual, can effectively exacerbate authoritarian rule in already Not Free countries and undermine the remaining safeguards in Partly Free countries, as demonstrated by the experiences of six countries, including Ethiopia and Kyrgyzstan, that have declined from Partly Free to Not Free due to manipulated elections since 2005.

Elections are a defining component of democracy, but incumbent leaders around the world are manipulating the contests to extend their own power. In Not Free countries, governments work to make elections lopsided by harassing, disqualifying, or jailing opposition candidates and parties. In Egypt’s 2025 parliamentary elections, for example, the National Elections Authority eliminated all but President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s National Unified List for Egypt from the party-list portion of the ballot, giving voters no real choice. In Tajikistan, the authoritarian regime of President Emomali Rahmon, who has held power since 1992, stripped legal registration from the main opposition party and harassed, imprisoned, and in some cases killed party members and their relatives before an election in 2015. This repression has continued in the years since, and today there is little space for meaningful competition in Tajikistan’s elections. The country’s score for 2025 was just 5 out of 100, compared with 30 as of 2005.

In democracies, illiberal leaders rely on more nuanced tactics than imprisoning or banning the opposition. Gerrymandering and malapportionment of legislative districts give the appearance of full political participation in elections while ensuring that certain parts of the population cannot influence the outcome. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party took this approach ahead of the 2014 parliamentary elections. Gerrymandering of new constituencies and disproportionate vote allocation to Fidesz supporters helped cement Orbán’s grip on power, and the ruling party’s supermajority in the parliament allowed it to push through legal and constitutional changes that undermined Hungary’s independent institutions and ultimately set the country on a sustained path of democratic decline.

Vote buying and intimidation not only sway election outcomes but can mark the first steps toward greater electoral manipulation. Georgia’s 2018 presidential election, for example, while peaceful, was marred by credible reports of illegal campaign donations, vote buying, and intimidation by powerful political elites. Just days before the runoff vote in November, a charitable foundation controlled by Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in Georgia and the founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party, promised to write off the debts of over 600,000 Georgian voters. Since then, the country’s elections have suffered from more extensive problems, including the abuse of state resources, physical intimidation at polling places, violence, boycotts by political parties, and threats to ballot secrecy.

A growing number of elected leaders have sought to undermine other branches of government, like the judiciary and the legislature, because they provide critical checks on the executive. Since his election in 2019, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has governed under a state of emergency, arrested and persecuted individuals who challenge his administration’s human rights abuses, and eliminated the independence of other state institutions, contributing to the world’s eighth largest score decline over the last 20 years. During his first years in office, the Supreme Court frequently ruled against the president, and he often responded by defying its orders. In 2021, however, Bukele used his enlarged majority in the legislature to replace all members of the court’s Constitutional Chamber as well as the attorney general with government loyalists. The new panel of judges quickly set aside a constitutional ban on presidential reelection, allowing Bukele to run again in 2024. In 2025, the legislature rubber-stamped a constitutional amendment that removed presidential term limits entirely, further aiding the incumbent’s consolidation of power.

Because independent auditing organizations are often the first to raise the alarm about executive overreach, illiberal leaders have found ways to pressure and discredit them. In 2024, the Mexican Congress approved a constitutional reform that eliminated the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information, and Personal Data Protection (INAI), and no similar body has since been established to replace it. The reform has effectively resulted in less transparency, and the loss of integrated access-to-information systems has made it harder for journalists to hold the government accountable for its performance. This was one of a series of changes to Mexico’s institutions that year, including sweeping judicial reforms that replaced the appointment system for judges with direct judicial elections, which limits the courts’ independence by subjecting judges to partisan oversight and making it harder for them to issue rulings against the government.

Authoritarian repression

During the last two decades, the rulers of established autocracies have not simply dismantled institutional checks on their rule. They have taken the additional step of converting the structures and resources of the state into weapons with which to attack their opponents and critics. In settings where institutional guardrails have already been weakened or eliminated, there is nothing to prevent autocrats from using the security forces and the courts as tools of repression.

Since 2005, Azerbaijan has experienced a steady consolidation of authoritarian rule centered on President Ilham Aliyev and his extended family. After succeeding his father as president in 2003, Aliyev pushed through constitutional changes that expanded presidential authority, removed term limits, and weakened any remaining legislative or judicial autonomy. In the absence of an independent judiciary or even independent media, corruption has continued to proliferate, and the Aliyev family has treated public assets as a source of private wealth.

Authoritarian regimes like that in Azerbaijan can leverage the full weight of state institutions, abuse state resources, and rely on corrupt patronage networks to maintain their political dominance. The Aliyevs have used the state oil company as a vehicle for political and economic largesse, awarding lucrative contracts and senior company positions to businesses and individuals who are loyal to the regime. In return, during elections, the recipients of this patronage pressure employees to support the ruling party by attending political rallies and participating in other public displays of fealty. Furthermore, public funds are used to finance progovernment media that boost the regime’s image while smearing any opposition.

When patronage and propaganda prove insufficient to silence dissent, autocrats use their control over the security forces and criminal justice system to engage in blunter forms of repression. Although Azerbaijan has retained its Not Free status since 2002, it has dropped from a score of 33 to just 6 out of 100 over the last two decades, as authorities have intensified their crackdown on civil liberties. Journalists, human rights activists, and members of the political opposition face arbitrary arrest and prosecution on trumped-up criminal charges, and they are denied basic due process during unfair trial proceedings. Legal amendments adopted in 2018 stipulated that only lawyers from the Azerbaijani Bar Association, which acts on the orders of the Ministry of Justice, could represent clients in court, and nearly all independent human rights lawyers in the country have been disbarred or suspended.

In the worst cases, autocrats have used the military and security services to violently crush citizens’ attempts to exercise their rights. In 2020, Belarus’s deeply authoritarian government was confronted with mass demonstrations against the fraudulent reelection of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Security forces employed disproportionate and lethal violence to break up the protests, with officers arresting, beating, or firing at Belarusian and foreign journalists who attempted to cover the events. More than 32,000 people were detained, and there were reports of detainees facing assaults, torture, and other human rights abuses. Ultimately, scores of prodemocracy leaders and activists were expelled from the country for their involvement in the protests, and many others have been forced into exile since then. The violent crackdown led to an 8-point decline in Belarus’s score for 2020, and after further declines it is now just 7 out of 100.

Attacks on media freedom

Broad freedom for independent media ensures that governments are held accountable for their performance and allows for transparent, diverse, and critical reporting. However, authorities have employed a variety of tactics to restrict media freedom. In more democratic settings, illiberal leaders tend to exert undue political, regulatory, or economic influence over the media sector, and subject journalists and news outlets to legal harassment. Dramatic, wholesale attacks are relatively rare; instead, media freedom is weakened through a series of escalatory maneuvers.

A common first step in undermining independent journalism is to increase control over public media or the regulation of private media. Further escalation can involve more frequent legal harassment, such as strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs); the withholding of publicly allocated funds; and the redirection of advertising revenue away from critical news outlets. At this point, government allies may begin to buy up media outlets and skew their coverage. In media landscapes that become dominated by state-funded or government-aligned outlets, the authorities could seek to suspend the licenses or intimidate the journalists of the remaining independent news sources.

In more autocratic states, where media freedom has already experienced significant deterioration or has historically been restricted, the government often engages in extralegal harassment or more explicit and comprehensive censorship, leading to further authoritarian entrenchment. For example, the CCP had long exerted significant control over China’s media landscape when party leader and state president Xi Jinping took power in 2012–13, but censorship efforts have since intensified as he consolidated authority to an unprecedented degree, with increasingly tight and technologically sophisticated restrictions on the internet and online content. This trend caused China’s score for media freedom to drop to 0 out of 4 in 2018.

Rwanda’s media freedom score likewise declined to the lowest possible level in 2010. That year, as the ruling party was working to ensure incumbent President Paul Kagame’s reelection, the government suspended about 30 news outlets and arrested two journalists for allegedly insulting Kagame and denying the 1994 genocide, which are common allegations used by Rwandan authorities to prosecute political opponents and dissidents. The editors of two prominent newspapers fled the country due to death threats, and one of their colleagues was assassinated.

Shrinking space for personal expression

Freedom of personal expression facilitates open discussion on sensitive or contentious topics, creating a marketplace of ideas in which crucial policies can be debated and democracy in general can flourish. While the rise of the internet and other information technologies has fueled innovative prodemocracy activism over the last 20 years, illiberal and authoritarian governments have increasingly responded with digital surveillance and prosecutions for online speech. Constraints on offline speech continue to be imposed as well.

During the last two decades, digital surveillance has more frequently resulted in heavier restrictions on personal expression. Such declines have tended to cluster in weaker democracies. In Serbia, which has faced democratic backsliding under President Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party, police and intelligence services have reportedly deployed a variety of spyware products to surveil journalists, civil society actors, and protest organizers. For example, at least dozens and perhaps hundreds of personal devices have been targeted with a unique spyware tool referred to as NoviSpy, but the exact number is unknown given that authorities have installed it secretly during arrests, detentions, and police interviews. Such actions have contributed to Serbia’s overall score decline in Freedom in the World in recent years, as awareness of unchecked state surveillance motivates self-censorship among ordinary citizens.

Extensive offline surveillance—and the risk of physical repercussions—has driven some countries to the worst possible score for personal expression. In Burundi, for example, the score for this indicator declined to 0 out of 4 due to events ahead of a 2018 constitutional referendum that would lengthen presidential terms. The national intelligence services engaged in heightened surveillance, while a ruling party militia checked citizens’ voter registration status and reportedly assaulted people who spoke against the referendum in public spaces.

In just the last five years, prosecution of offline and online speech has grown increasingly common in authoritarian states, further hindering public and private discussion and deepening overall repression in environments that were already heavily constrained. Between 2020 and 2025, six countries—Belarus, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Tajikistan, and Venezuela—dropped to the lowest possible score for freedom of personal expression due to large-scale arrests for or prosecution of critical speech. Combined with measures such as social media monitoring, the use of civilian informants, and the application of new laws with harsher penalties, such extensive enforcement practices have created a chilling effect throughout society.

Minimal due process rights

Due process is a key component of the rule of law, ensuring that no one is deprived of their liberty or property arbitrarily, without a fair hearing before an impartial tribunal and ample opportunity for appeal. The rights of defendants and detainees have suffered amid the broader assault on global freedom, and two key tactics have become prominent over the past 20 years. The first is increased government control over courts, prosecutors, and police. The second is the use of criminal cases to sideline political dissidents at moments when the ruling power faces significant pressure.

Political control over the justice system and police forces, including interference in individual cases, tends to increase in backsliding democracies and nascent authoritarian regimes. In Turkey, for example, where Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party have gradually consolidated power and repressed dissent since taking office in 2002, a 2010 constitutional referendum cleared the way for an overhaul of the judiciary. In 2014, the government began to reassign thousands of police officers, judges, and prosecutors. Following a coup attempt two years later, due process rights deteriorated further, as the authorities brought a surge of new charges based on flimsy evidence or secret testimony, with defendants often held in lengthy pretrial detention. Since then, the imprisonment of political opponents, independent journalists, and activists has become routine, and Turkey has the worst possible score for the right to due process. In March 2025, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who was widely seen as Erdoğan’s main political challenger, was arrested and placed in pretrial detention based on a raft of dubious charges. He faced up to 2,000 years in prison, and given the politicization of the judiciary, was unlikely to receive a fair trial.

Authorities tend to step up their persecution of political dissidents when those in power feel especially vulnerable. Due process rights in Hong Kong deteriorated in 2017 when the Court of Appeal, at the behest of the government, handed down heavier penalties to protesters involved in the 2014 Umbrella Movement, which called for greater democracy and self-determination for the territory. Separately, police filed new charges against some of the movement’s organizers. The score pertaining to due process rights dropped further after Beijing imposed the National Security Law on Hong Kong in 2020, as a response to fresh prodemocracy protests in 2019. Among other problematic provisions, the law allowed for closed trials and for cases to be adjudicated in mainland China.

While positive stories of countries successfully rebuilding their institutions after years of conflict are few and far between, lessons can be learned from Liberia, which suffered two consecutive civil wars that ended in 2003. It is one of the 52 countries that have seen an overall improvement in their scores over the last 20 years, having made considerable progress in restoring government capacity, reestablishing the rule of law, and ensuring citizens’ political rights and civil liberties in the postwar period. Perhaps nowhere will these lessons be more relevant in 2026 than in Syria, where citizens and a transitional government face profound challenges in erecting a democratic system after more than half a century of dictatorship. The civil war that began in 2011 has devastated public institutions and infrastructure, while sectarian polarization and ongoing violence further complicate efforts to create credible transitional justice mechanisms and introduce the rule of law.

Democratic principles and freedoms are widely appealing and will always inspire advocates and champions. Despite increasing pressure from the government, independent media in Hungary have been able to survive by making use of digital tools, collaborations and partnerships, and innovative funding strategies. Serbian civil society groups are educating people on the ramifications of spyware and offering practical guidance on digital security and data protection. Even in China, citizens have continued to find ways to publish independent reporting and express dissent. As the CCP intensified its censorship in recent years, journalists, activists, and internet users explored new methods for uncovering state abuses, accessing information, and commenting on sensitive topics even at considerable risk to their own safety. In the third quarter of 2025 alone, Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor registered nearly 1,400 protests and other acts of dissent, a 45 percent increase over the same period in 2024, and the sixth straight quarter of year-on-year increases.

The desire for freedom is inexhaustible. Democracies are stable and successful precisely because they address this and other fundamental needs, and people who have experienced dictatorship will continue their attempts to raise up new democracies, no matter how daunting the circumstances. But authoritarian regimes are still on the march around the world, and only the combined efforts of human rights defenders, civil society organizations, and democratic governments can hasten the day when all people are able to live in freedom.