Freedom House: Nagorno-Karabakh is freer than Azerbaijan
A leading democracy watchdog says global freedom suffered a "disturbing" decline in 2014, with Syria ranking as the world's least free country and Russia's "invasion" of Ukraine dealing a bad blow to democracy. In an annual report “Freedom in the World 2015”, U.S.-based Freedom House assessed the level of freedom in 195 countries. Nagorno-Karabakh has surpassed Azerbaijan in the political rights (PR) and the civil liberties (CL) indicators. In its annual Freedom in the World 2015 reports, Freedom House gave five points to Nagorno Karabakh for its political and civil liberties levels. Nagorno-Karabakh has received 5 points—in a 7-point scale, where 1 is Free, and 7 is Not Free—in CL, and 5 for PR. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, has received 6 points in both indicators, thus approaching the indicator for the virtually complete absence of democratic freedoms. Armenia is significantly better positioned, and it is included among the Partly Free countries, with 5 and 4 points for PR and CL, respectively. As a result, Armenia, together with Georgia and Turkey, is among the three Partly Free countries in the region, whereas the other regional countries—including Azerbaijan, Iran, and Russia—have been regarded as Not Free. Freedom House said terrorism had a "devastating" impact on countries including Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Nigeria. It pointed to terrorism as a leading factor, saying Islamist militants in many regions of the world "massacred security forces and civilians alike, took foreigners hostage, and killed or enslaved religious minorities, including Muslims they deemed apostates." Ukraine was rated as only "partly free." Crimea -- under Russian control since March -- was evaluated separately for the first time and received ratings "only slightly better" than those of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, two of the worst-ranked countries. The other "worst of the worst" countries and territories were the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tibet, and Western Sahara. Of the 195 countries assessed in the report, 89 were rated "free," 55 "partly free," and 51 "not free."
