Guyana is rated “Free” in Freedom House’s latest Freedom in the World report, an annual study of political rights and civil liberties worldwide, although it still has the lowest score among Carib-bean countries except for Haiti.
According to the recent report, Guyana scored 73 out of a 100 in freedom, 30 out of 40 in the area of political rights, and 43 out of 60 in civil liberties, compared to 75, 32 and 43, respectively, last year, and 74, 32 and 42 in 2019.
The highest scoring Caribbean country is Barbados with scores of 95, 38 and 57, followed by Dominica with scores of 93, 37 and 56. St Vincent & the Grenadines follows with scores of 91, 36 and 55, St Lucia with 91, 37 and 54, Grenada with 89, 37 and 52, Trinidad & Tobago with 82, 33 and 49, and Jamaica with 80, 34 and 46. Haiti has the lowest scores with 37, 35 and 22.
The report said the full Freedom in the World 2021 narrative report for Guyana is not yet available but will be posted as soon as it becomes available.
However, in last year’s report the narrative noted that Guyana is a parliamentary democracy that features regular elections, a lively press, and a robust civil society. But it indicated that “violent crime and discrimination against indigenous and LGBT+ people remain significant problems”.
It had pointed out as well that in September of 2019 the President David Granger had scheduled general elections for March 2, 2020. Granger’s government, it had noted, had lost a no-confidence vote in December 2018, but it delayed the announcement of elections for much of 2019 through legal challenges and procedural disputes.
“The largely Indo-Guyanese People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C), the country’s main opposition group, organized protests against the predominantly Afro-Guyanese governing coalition over its failure to schedule elections,” it had said at the time.
Freedom House is a U.S.-based, U.S. government-funded non-profit non-governmental organisation (NGO) that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom, and human rights. Freedom House was founded in October 1941, and Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt served as its first honorary chairpersons.
Freedom in the World rates people’s access to political rights and civil liberties in 195 countries and 15 territories, providing both numerical ratings and supporting descriptive texts.
It assigns Free, Partly Free, Not Free statuses, which are the combination of the overall score awarded for political rights and the overall score awarded for civil liberties, after being equally weighted.
The Freedom in the World is an annual global report on political rights and
civil liberties, composed of numerical ratings and descriptive texts for each country and a select group of territories. The 2021 edition covers developments in the listed countries and 15 territories from January 1, 2020, through December 31, 2020.
In this year’s overview it was stated that the COVID-19 pandemic, economic and physical insecurity, and violent conflict ravaged the world in 2020 and as such democracy’s defenders sustained heavy new losses in their struggle against authoritarian foes, shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny. “Incumbent leaders increasingly used force to crush opponents and settle scores, sometimes in the name of public health, while beleaguered activists—lacking effective international support—faced heavy jail sentences, torture, or murder in many settings,” the report noted.
It said that those withering blows marked the 15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. According to the report 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.
