Freedom house
Autocracy is "making gains against democracy and encouraging more leaders to abandon the democratic path to security and prosperity." This is one of the conclusions of the newly published report Freedom in the World 2022 - The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule, released by the U.S. NGO Freedom House.
According to the analysis, Serbia has maintained its status of a partly free state and has been marked as a country that has seen the biggest decline in political rights and civil liberties over the past 10 years, Voice of America has reported.
That group includes, among others, Turkey, Hungary, Afghanistan, Poland, and the United States. Freedom House has for the second year in a row placed Serbia and the U.S. among the states that have conspicuously backslid over the last decade. The other Western Balkan countries - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and North Macedonia also remain in the "partly free" category, reads the report.
The Freedom House report does not deal extensively with the states in the area, although it does mention Bosnia and Herzegovina in the context of the relationship some members of its political leadership have with Hungary.
"(Hungarian Prime Minister) Orban has lent support to multiple European counterparts who share his views, shielding them from possible EU sanctions. The beneficiaries include Milorad Dodik, a Serb nationalist leader in Bosnia and Herzegovina who has suppressed domestic dissent and pushed for the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska to secede from the multiethnic Bosnian state," says the report.
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