Less and less freedom on the web: The 2014 Freedom House Report

According to the Freedom House report for 2014, freedom on the web is worsening year by year. In fact, 36 out of the 65 countries assessed in the report experienced a negative trajectory between May 2013 and May 2014. In particular, control over the Internet has increased in many countries; there have been arrests for online news and opinions about political issues (especially in the Middle East and North Africa); the amount of pressure and reprisals against citizen journalists who use the web as the main platform for their work critically rose notably in the countries where internal conflicts or antigovernment protests are going on, such as Syria, Ukraine, Egypt and Turkey.

Freedom House is an independent watchdog organization, founded in 1941 in New York by a group of prominent journalists, scholars, political figures and labor leaders, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie. Since then, it supported the spread of democracy as a weapon against totalitarian ideologies by endorsing some U.S. policies and institutions abroad (like Marshall Plan or NATO) and by publishing annual reports about worldwide freedom of speech.

The situation in former Soviet republics is mixed. While some countries are ranked ‘free’ and are getting a wider access to the Internet, others have a ‘partly free’ or even ‘not free’ status and experience censorship and control over the web. Among the ranked countries of the Asian region, Armenia and Georgia have a ‘free’ status of the Internet, with scores of 28 and 26 respectively on an 100-point scale index; Azerbaijan (55), Kazakhstan (66) and Kyrgyzstan (34) are ‘partly free’ with a stable or worsening situation; while Uzbekistan still has a ‘not free’ status (79), due to high surveillance over Internet access and arrests of online journalists. In the European area, the situation of Ukraine got worse (from 28 in 2013 to 33), despite maintaining a ‘partly free’ status, mainly due to the escalation of violence in protests and in the internal conflict. In its turn, the situation in Russia and Belarus seems to be more critical. The former, despite being ranked ‘partly free’, scored 60 and introduced new laws implementing web surveillance, which is accompanied by legal harassment and physical attacks on online journalists. The latter, scoring 62, has a ‘not free’ status, due to a deep although occasional control of the web contents and to harassment and detentions of activists for their online activities; despite that, the report noticed an ‘improvement in the situation of the Internet’. Moldova’s status has not been covered.