An annual report on the civil rights of countries worldwide has downgraded Australia’s democracy from “open” to “narrowed”.
The CIVICUS Monitor is a collaboration between human rights organisations around the world, to assess the democratic freedoms of 196 countries.
This was due to recent police raids on media outlets, the growing trend of prosecuting whistleblowers like Witness K - and the increasing crackdown on peaceful protest.
The CIVICUS Monitor combines several different sources of data looking at things like the freedoms of association, peaceful assembly and ‘expression’.
Australia is one of three countries that were downgraded in the Asia Pacific region in 2019, with India and Brunei going from obstructed to repressed.
The report also found that the percentage of the world’s population living in a ‘repressed’ democracy doubled in the last 12 months, to 40 per cent.
Dominican Republic and Moldova were both updated in terms of civic freedom from ‘obstructed’ to ‘narrowed’. »