Free Republic

While the number of fatalities attributed to Covid-19 is carefully tracked by governments, few people have recognized how pandemic-spurred crackdowns have devastated democracy around the world. Emergency proclamations have entitled presidents and other government officials to seize vast new powers previously forbidden to them. Government bureaucrats became a new priesthood that could sanctify unlimited sacrifices merely by invoking dubious statistical extrapolations of future perils. In October, Freedom House issued a report, Democracy under Lockdown – The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Freedom, which warned that since the pandemic started, “the condition of democracy and human rights has worsened in 80...

A study by a government-funded NGO in the US has sounded the alarm on deteriorating levels of liberty in democratic and authoritarian countries alike, including extensive criticism of India, China and the US itself The Freedom in the World 2020 report assessed 195 countries, rating 83 of them as “free,” 63 as “partly free,” and 49 as “not free.” The Freedom House, which boasts Eleanor Roosevelt as a co-founder, has compiled the index each year since 1973. The share of countries rated free has declined by 3% in the last decade. The index incorporates factors such as the functioning of...

Mukhtar Dzhakishev is by all accounts in miserable shape.Languishing in a “harsh” Kazakhstan prison colony that was once part of Stalin’s gulag system, he suffers from hypertension, hardened arteries and kidney disease likely triggered by a severe beating.“His life is constantly at risk,” one human-rights group warned in September, as it urged the international community to advocate on Dzakishev’s behalf.Largely unable to communicate with the outside world, the former head of Kazakhstan’s state uranium conglomerate has made one thing clear: he blames his arrest and 14-year prison term at least in part on a Canadian company’s corporate dealings.More specifically, Dzakishev...

There are two main reasons that many leftists who are viscerally supportive of Israel have difficulty understanding and defending the Jewish state today. First, the storyline about Israel is deeply distorted. For instance, this week, Freedom House released its annual report on press freedom around the world. Israel's ranking was reduced from "free" to "partly free." Freedom House gave three reasons for downgrading Israel's status: the prosecution of Haaretz reporter Uri Blau for holding stolen top-secret documents; Channel 10's difficulties getting its broadcast license renewed; and the success of the Israel Hayom newspaper. As Jonathan Tobin at Commentary noted Wednesday,...

It feels strange visiting a country like Morocco and listening to people extol the virtues of a political system my country waged a revolution against. Morocco has a king, and he’s a real one too, not some kind of a figurehead. But I went there, I listened, and after almost ten years of visiting Middle Eastern countries wracked by tyranny, terrorism, botched revolutions, and wars, I was perhaps a bit more willing to hear what they had to say than I might have been a decade ago. A monarchy is a tough sell for Americans. The founders of our country...

You won't hear it from the Obama administration, but there's still a revolution going on in Iran. Massive protests—which began in June following the sham election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—persisted last month on Quds Day, when the government attempted to orchestrate nationwide anti-Israel marches. Refusing to follow the regime's script, marchers chanted "Death to Russia" and "Death to China" instead. (Russia was the first country to recognize Ahmadinejad as president in June, and China maintains rich commercial ties with Tehran.) State television abruptly stopped airing the marches. Two weeks ago, the Islamic Republic sentenced three people to death for participating in...

Obama's State Department cuts funding for Freedom House to placate Iran "Denying the Green Revolution" (Wall Street Journal, October 23 2009) reports that Barack Obama's State Department has cut funding for Freedom House, the bipartisan organization that reports on freedom and human rights throughout the world, because it publishes material critical of Iran's murderous regime. Freedom House was founded largely by Franklin Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt was its honorary chairman. As reported by the Wall Street Journal article, The Boston Globe reported this month that the Connecticut-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center recently lost its State Department funding. The Center—a...

WASHINGTON - In a worldwide survey, a democracy watchdog organization said 90 countries respect a broad array of basic human rights and political freedom while 103 countries fail to some degree to observe standards of liberal democracy. Eight countries were judged by Freedom House, the New York-based organization, to have the most repressive regimes. They were Cuba, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Two restive territories, Chechnya and Tibet, "whose inhabitants suffer intense repression," the organization said, were placed in the lowest category, as well. Violent repression of protests of food prices in Myanmar, or Burma as...

WASHINGTON - In a worldwide survey of repressive regimes, 17 countries including Libya and North Korea are singled out by a human rights group as "the worst of the worst" for maltreatment of their citizens last year. Most of the cited countries are repeat-offenders, and 45 countries were rated not free to some degree. The eight countries judged to have the worst records on political rights and civil liberties were Burma, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Similarly branded for particularly repressive behavior were two territories, Chechnya and Tibet. Within these countries and territories "state control over...

A recent article in the Washington Post, written by Nina Shea of Freedom House, laid bare Saudi hypocrisy in claiming to have removed hateful material from textbooks, when in fact that material remains in abundance. This is not just an issue within the Kingdom, for the Saudis export such material in large quantities to Muslims in other countries. But the article points to a deeper problem – one that Western authorities sooner or later will have to deal with: much of the objectionable material is actually derived from the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an, and from Hadith (traditions of the...

Bush Enters Iran 'Freedom' Debate March 31, 2006 The Financial Times Guy Dinmore in Washington In choosing Freedom House as the venue for a foreign policy address this week, President George W. Bush has stepped into an intense debate among democracy activists in the US and Iran on how US dollars should be used to carry out the administration's policy of promoting freedom in the Islamic republic. Few in the Washington audience on Wednesday realised that Freedom House, an independent institution founded more than 60 years ago by Eleanor Roosevelt, the former first lady, is one of several organisations selected...

The president met with Nigeria's president Obasanjo in the Oval Office, and discussed freedom in Iraq with an audience in Freedom House (D.C.), reminding the people that Saddam Hussein, not continued U.S. involvement in Iraq, is responsible for ongoing sectarian violence that is threatening the formation of a democratic government. He is heading to Cancun, Mexico to meet with the leaders of Mexico and Canada for two days. Welcome to SANITY ISLAND!

Today President Bush gave a terrific, all-inclusive, emotional talk on Iraq,and on all of the important and critical dangers and hopes for the free world!!! And yet I have seen almost no real press coverage of the whole thing---It was covered by the big three Cable Networks but still not much chatter or any other comments!! (I could have missed some) His conviction, his composure, his determination, his honesty were shining all thru the remarks. Give him a chance to keep freedom growing around the world!! Give him more press now that his "ratings" are down!!!!

EVER SINCE 9/11, we learned last month, federal officials have been monitoring radiation levels around a number of American mosques. It is an understandable precaution, given Al Qaeda's interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, and its history of mass murder. Understandable -- but also troubling. In a nation as tolerant as this one, nobody can be happy about the need to focus self-defensive attention on mosques. Unfortunately, we are at war with violent Islamist radicals, and they are not above using mosques to incubate terrorism. If there is evidence of heightened radioactivity around a Muslim facility, the government should be aware...

WASHINGTON - As the political battle intensifies over President Bush's efforts to spread democracy to Iraq and the Middle East, an influential human rights organization, Freedom House, has found that the past year brought significant improvements in personal and political rights across the region. Reports of increased freedom emerged from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian territories, and observers attributed the results to the Bush administration's support of fledgling democracies worldwide.

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 16, 2005 -- The constitution voted on yesterday in Iraq may well constitute an obstacle to securing human rights and individual liberties should it be approved, Freedom House said today. Immediate and comprehensive efforts should be undertaken to ensure that post-referendum amendments and enabling legislation for the constitution address the most problematic provisions. On October 15, Iraqis voted in a national referendum on whether to adopt a constitution that emerged in mid-September after months of negotiation and was expected to be approved. A political agreement reached last week commits Iraq's leaders to consider new amendments to the...

No, this is not a post about the Texas Air National Guard or the how the Vietnam War continues to haunt the national political psyche but of democracy and our national interests. Bruce Kesler, a columnist for the Augusta-Free Press alerted me to the underreported fact that Phan Van Khai, the Prime Minister of Vietnam, will be visiting the United States and meeting with President Bush- a key step in an increasingly warm relationship between Washington and Hanoi. The Prime Minister does not come empty-handed but instead brings with him a jet deal for Boeing that will net the corporation...

The US is turning on old friends in Europe, writes John Laughland. Before he denounced the "prevailing influence" of the US in the "anti-constitutional coup" that overthrew him, President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan used an interesting phrase to attack those who were stirring up trouble in the drug-ridden Ferghana Valley. A criminal "third force", linked to the drug mafia, was struggling to gain power. Originally a label for covert operatives shoring up apartheid in South Africa before it was adopted by the US-backed "pro-democracy" movement in Iran in November 2001, the third force is also the title of a book...

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, March 29 - Shortly before Kyrgyzstan's recent parliamentary elections, an opposition newspaper ran photographs of a palatial home under construction for the country's deeply unpopular president, Askar Akayev, helping set off widespread outrage and a popular revolt in this poor Central Asian country. The newspaper was the recipient of United States government grants and was printed on an American government-financed printing press operated by Freedom House, an American organization that describes itself as "a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world." In addition to the United States, several European countries - Britain, the Netherlands and Norway...

Suddenly, the political tectonic plates of the Middle East are shifting. Why is George W Bush being so modest about it? Jon Swain in Cairo and Sarah Baxter in Washington explain In a faded Washington mansion with a grand circular staircase, the formerly elegant ballroom is now cluttered with desks and telephones. The lines were busy late last year with calls to Ukraine. Now they are connected to dissidents and reformers in Lebanon, Egypt and other countries in the Middle East where democracy is stirring.