ArmInfo.The human rights organization Freedom House has published another report, measuring the level of freedom in different countries of the world "Transition countries of 2018", in which they called Armenia a country "moving in a negative direction" towards authoritarianism.
Thus, according to the report, Armenia regressed on the indicators of democracy and corruption "because of the deepening of systemic corruption as a result of the concentration of the executive, legislative and judicial authorities in the hands of the ruling Republican Party and the government's unwillingness to eradicate high-level abuses."
Along with Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan are among the countries that Freedom House estimated in 2017 to "move in a negative direction" towards authoritarianism. According to Freedom House from the post-Soviet countries, the incomplete "entrenched autocracies" are Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
The authors of the report note a sharp deterioration of the situation with freedom of speech in Poland, Hungary and Serbia. In Poland, in their opinion, the government "undermined the legal system." Hungary and Serbia sharply fell in the rating. The organization criticizes the government of Viktor Orban and notes that in the last year "two laws in the Russian style" were adopted in Hungary: the first restricts the work of non-profit organizations with foreign funding, the second closed the Central European University in Budapest.
Freedom House urges the European Union to take measures as soon as possible against Poland and Hungary, otherwise "what is happening in Warsaw and Budapest can spread to Paris and Berlin."