Worldwide, Liberty Declined In 2007, Freedom House Survey Finds

Editor&Publisher: Worldwide, Liberty Declined In 2007, Freedom House Survey Finds
By E&P Staff
Published: January 16, 2008

CHICAGO Fewer than half of Earth's population live in places that can be called free -- and the march of liberty worldwide reversed itself significantly in 2007, Freedom House reported Wednesday in its annual survey of global freedom.

Freedom declined in one-fifth of the world's countries in 2007, the New York City-based non-governmental organization said. Liberty's reversal was "most pronounced" in South Asia, but also covered a wide swath of the Earth, including nations of the Middle East, North and sub-Saharan Africa, and the former Soviet Union. Freedom House said the environment of human rights and liberty in countries it had previously rated as Not Free grew worse among some important powers, such as Russia, Pakistan, Kenya, Egypt, Nigeria, and Venezuela.

The full report, Freedom in the World 2008 is available here: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=395

There was little change in the actual numbers of countries designated Free, Partly Free, or Not Free. What changed, Freedom House said, was the climate of liberty inside the broad categories. "Nearly four times as many countries showed declines during the year as registered improvement," the organization said. In Egypt and Pakistan, for instance, authoritarian regimes stepped up efforts to suppress independent media, democratic opposition, and civil society in general. And "group of market-oriented autocracies and energy-rich dictatorships" -- Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and China -- carried out "assaults" on freedom of association during the year, Freedom House said.

"This year's results show a profoundly disturbing deterioration of freedom worldwide," Arch Puddington, Freedom House's director of research, said in a statement. "A number of countries that had previously shown progress toward democracy have regressed, while none of the most influential Not Free states showed signs of improvement. As the second consecutive year that the survey has registered a global decline in political rights and civil liberties, friends of freedom worldwide have real cause for concern."...

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003696984

At least we don't get shot crossing the borders (to leave).

I had this pegged as soon as Bushler stole the election, even before 9/11. It was obvious that his seizure of America indicated that freedom and liberty "had jumped the shark" and theat the Bushies of the world were going to follow suit and get their peasants back into line, as the Bushies were doing to the American Peasantry.

Other nations, upon seeing what Bushler so easily did, must have been scratchingtheir heads and wondering how they could have bought that "freedom" bullshit from America for all those years when clearly freedom is not what the Rulers of Amerika are interested in.

I predicted that secret policeman and dictators all over the world would sit up and takle note, and it was shortly after Bush seized America that Putin started putting the clamps on Russia. I don't believe it was coincidental and Putin, as an ex-KGB Man, must have been among the first to realize that the Bushies were KGB-soulmates.

This is the dawning of the Age of Totalitarianism, lead by America.