(TibetanReview.net, Mar01’24) – With an abysmal -2 out of 40 for Political Rights and just 2 out of 60 for Civil Liberties, China-ruled Tibet has scored a total of zero out of 100 for “Freedom” in the international rights group Freedom House’s latest annual survey of Freedom in the World released Feb 29. With a score like that, the group has ranked the occupied territory as “Not Free”. In fact, it ranked just above the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh (-3) in this year’s global ranking.
Nagorno-Karabakh has been in the news recently due to the violent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over territorial sovereignty.
The “zero” rating is Tibet’s worst in at last eight years. It had an overall score of 1 in Freedom House’s 2023 survey report, noted Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet on its savetibet.org website Feb 29.
China itself has scored -2 for political rights and 11 for civil liberties, so that its overall score is 9; it is therefore also ranked as “Not Free.”
Those that ranked above Tibet but with a total score of less than 10 are: Syria (1), South Sudan (1), Turkmenistan (2), Eastern Donbas (2), Crimea (2), North Korea (3), Eritrea (3), Western Sahara (4), Equatorial Guinea (5), Tajikistan (5), Sudan (5), Central African Republic (5), Afghanistan (6), Azerbaijan (7), Somalia (8), Saudi Arabia (8), Myanmar (8), Belarus (8), Gaza Strip (8), Libya (9), and China (9).
The group’s 2024 report has highlighted Hong Kong and Tibet as “among the least free places on earth” due to the “exercise of unchecked power.”
Yana Gorokhovskaia, research director for strategy and design at Freedom House, has said: “In Tibet last year, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) separated over a million children from their families and put them in state-run boarding schools, where … Chinese language and culture was forcefully inculcated.”
The rights group’s 2024 survey covers the situation of freedom in 210 countries and territories.
The freest countries or territories in the Asia-Pacific region, in comparative terms, New Zealand (99), Japan (96), Australia (95) and Taiwan (94). And the worst in the region are China (9), Myanmar (8), North Korea (3) and Tibet (0).
Both Myanmar and Tibet have lost one point since last year’s report.
The annual report gives each country – and many disputed territories – a score from 1 to 100 using 25 specific indicators based on the provisions of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and then declares them “free,” or “partly free”, or “not free.”
Globally, the report said, the “breadth and depth” of the decline in freedoms last year was significant, with political rights and civil liberties having diminished in a total of 52 countries and improved in only 21.
Adrian Shahbaz, the vice president of research and analysis at Freedom House, said at the launch of the report that it was the 18th straight year of declines, noted rfa.org Feb 29.
Freedom House noted that flawed elections and armed conflict contributed to the 18th year of democratic decline. However, by drawing strength from diversity, protecting dissent, and building international coalitions to support their own norms and values, democratic forces can still reverse the long decline in global freedom, it added.