After the Revolution

The Freedom House Freedom in the World 2008 survey, covering events from Jan. 1, 2007, to Dec. 31, 2007, indicated that in Georgia, political rights and civil liberties had diminished since the previous poll for the second year in a row. According to the report, the government restricted political rights by calling a “state of emergency” that limited political opposition. It restricted the freedom of expression by using force on protesters and by diminishing the power of the press.

The Freedom House survey also indicated a downward trend in freedoms in Kyrgyzstan. The report condemned restrictions placed on the political opposition in the December legislative elections and lamented that their outcome concentrated power in one political party.

Ukraine was the only country of the three covered in this blog designated as free; Georgia and Kyrgyzstan were rated as partly free.

The report defined a free country as “one where there is broad scope for open political competition, a climate of respect for civil liberties, significant independent civic life and independent media.” A partly free country was defined as “one in which there is limited respect for political rights and civil liberties.” This type of country “frequently suffer[s] from an environment of corruption, weak rule of law, ethnic and religious strife and often a setting in which a single political party enjoys dominance despite the façade of limited pluralism.”

The survey indicated that 47 percent of countries in the world (90 countries) were free; 31 percent (60 countries) were partly free, and 22 percent (43 countries) were not free.

Georgia and Ukraine were labeled electoral democracies, but Kyrgyzstan was not.

The study identified an electoral democracy as a country which had:

• A competitive multi-party political system;
• Universal adult suffrage for all citizens;
• Regularly contested elections conducted in conditions of ballot secrecy, reasonable ballot security and in the absence of massive voter fraud that yields results that are unrepresentative of the public will;
• Significant public access of major political parties to the electorate through the media and through generally open political campaigning

In the press release for the study, Freedom House included Kyrgyzstan and Georgia on the list of countries that had slid back significantly in the past year after previous improvements. The explanatory essay for the study stated that “[d]emocracy in Georgia, a key ‘color revolution’ country, was sullied by the imposition of a state of emergency and a violent police crackdown on demonstrators.”

The general trend identified by the study was a “pushback against democracy promotion,” using “legal restrictions, tax investigations, bureaucratic regulations and the like to neutralize opposition political parties and civil society organizations that seek political change.” The study said that authorities in countries such as Russia justified this “pushback” by saying it was necessary to prevent influence from outside forces such as the United States, but that the people most affected were those fighting for democracy within their own countries. The study named Georgia as one of the countries pressured by Russia, which disapproves of its leadership and policies.