Why We’re Keeping Hong Kong in Our Freedom Index SHARE
Now that Beijing has crushed Hong Kong’s autonomy, some are asking whether it makes sense to still rank Hong Kong in international indexes such as our Human Freedom Index. We will continue to do so, as I explained last month in this statement I released in response to press inquiries:
“The Cato Institute and Fraser Institute intend to continue including Hong Kong in the Human Freedom Index, which we co‐publish. We believe that the territory’s trajectory, from a former British colony to a special administrative region of China, is a unique case study worthy of continued attention and documentation within our index, especially as the Chinese Communist Party sustains its attacks on a broad array of Hong Kong’s freedoms. As long as sufficient data on Hong Kong is available, we think that providing a measure of its freedoms and what we expect will be their ongoing decline will be a useful exercise.”
By Nora Wolf
MAR 13, 2021
Building on the tasteful piece written recently by Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic, this article will endeavour to explore further why the Tromsø
Convention (Norwegian International Convention on Access to Official Documents) [1] , although adopted more than a decade ago, is in fact deserving of much more credit and fuss than it appears to have mustered so far.
To briefly catch everyone up, the Council of Europe (CoE) adopted in 2009 a Convention on Access to Official Documents foreseeing a general and minimal right for all to access public authorities’ official documents. Having entered into force last December, this convention pioneers a uniformed standardised right to obtain official documents and thereby information from official sources. Evidently, the treaty draws on the pillar values of any and all healthy democracies that are transparency, pluralism and self-development of the individuals making up our civil societies.
India Is No Longer a Democracy but an Electoral Autocracy : Swedish Institute
The V Dem Institute s report notes that much of the decline in democratic freedoms occurred after the BJP and Narendra Modi s victory in 2014.
Delhi police at Delhi-Meerut Expressway amidst farmer protests, in New Delhi on December 7. Photo: PTI
World11/Mar/2021
New Delhi: A Sweden-based institute has said that India is no longer an ‘electoral democracy’, classifying the country as an ‘electoral autocracy’ instead, noting that much of the decline in democratic freedoms occurred after the BJP and Narendra Modi’s victory in 2014.
The V-Dem Institute, an independent research institute based at the University of Gothenburg, has published data-heavy worldwide democracy reports since 2017. In last year’s report, it had observed that India was on the verge of losing its status as a democracy.
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