ZAGREB, 4 March, 2021 - Croatia ranks better than the USA, according to the criteria applied by Freedom House to measure global freedom, the Večernji List daily reported on Thursday.
Croatia's total score of 85 points places it in the category of free countries, and the total score of the USA is 83, according to the latest annual Freedom in the World report, in which Freedom House, a non-governmental organisation, rates people’s access to political rights and civil liberties in 210 countries and territories.
In the section Political Rights, Croatia's score is 36 out of the total 40 and in Civil Liberties it scores 49 points out of maximum 60 points.
The three Scandinavian countries -- Finland, Norway and Sweden -- top the ranking with the maximum 100 score.
Freedom House describes Croatia as "a parliamentary republic that regularly holds free elections. Civil and political rights are generally respected, though corruption in the public sector is a serious issue."
Concerning the European Union, of the 27 member states, Croatia fares better than Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and Hungary, while it fares worse than the remaining members according to assessments made by this nongovernmental organisation.
As for the global developments in 2020, the NGO says that "as a lethal pandemic, economic and physical insecurity, and violent conflict ravaged the world, democracy’s defenders sustained heavy new losses in their struggle against authoritarian foes, shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny."
Freedom House says in its latest report that "the countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006. The long democratic recession is deepening."
"The impact of the long-term democratic decline has become increasingly global in nature, broad enough to be felt by those living under the cruelest dictatorships, as well as by citizens of long-standing democracies," it added.
