CSPAN - Washington Journal Yana Gorokhovskaia
Aired: 2026-03-31
Duration: 37:59


=== Global Freedom Scores in 2025 (05:56) ===

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[00:01:05]  And joining us now to talk about a new report on freedom in the world declining is Freedom House researcher Jana Gorahovskaya, who is here to discuss the organization's annual report highlighting the decline in global freedom in 2025.
[00:01:20]  Jana, thanks so much for being with us this morning.
[00:01:23]  Thanks so much for having me.
[00:01:25]  All right, first up, can you remind our viewers what the Freedom House is?
[00:01:29]  What's your mission?
[00:01:30]  And how are you funded?
[00:01:33]  Absolutely.
[00:01:33]  So we are a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.
[00:01:37]  We were founded in 1941.
[00:01:39]  So we're about to celebrate our 85th anniversary.
[00:01:42]  We were founded by Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt, actually, in a bipartisan effort to help get Americans engaged in the fight against fascism in Europe.
[00:01:55]  We have different sources of funding.
[00:01:57]  So we have some government funding, we have non-foundational funding, we have private funding.
[00:02:03]  The report that I'm going to talk about today, very importantly, is not funded by any government.
[00:02:07]  Yeah, I was going to ask you, what is that report?
[00:02:10]  Freedom in the world.
[00:02:12]  It's an annual report, but how did it originate?
[00:02:15]  How did you guys start doing it?
[00:02:17]  Yeah, so the report actually has been published annually since 1973.
[00:02:22]  So it's one of the longest issued reports of its kind.
[00:02:26]  And what it is, is it's an index.
[00:02:28]  So we assess political rights and civil liberties in countries and territories around the world.
[00:02:34]  And we look at the experience of freedom.
[00:02:37]  So rather than government performance, what we're evaluating is people's ability to exercise their fundamental rights in a given space, whether that's impacted by their own government, a foreign government, or even non-state actors.
[00:02:51]  And our methodology, which has 25 indicators, was derived from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
[00:02:58]  Now, I want to show our viewers the headline of this report because it says, after 20 years of global decline, these basic freedoms have been hit the hardest.
[00:03:09]  Can you walk us through your findings?
[00:03:13]  Sure.
[00:03:13]  So what we do is we look at the level of freedom globally.
[00:03:18]  We assess each country and territory separately, but then we put that data together.
[00:03:22]  And what we found in 2025, and I should be clear, we assess a calendar year, so January 1st to December 31st every year.
[00:03:29]  So I'm talking about what's happened in 2025.
[00:03:33]  Freedom declined, which means that more countries experienced deterioration than saw improvement.
[00:03:39]  54 countries declined, 35 improved.
[00:03:43]  So it was not a good year for freedom in 2025, but it was also the 20th consecutive year of decline in freedom.
[00:03:50]  So that means that every year since 2005, we've seen more deterioration than improvement.
[00:03:57]  And that has had sort of disparate effects around the world.
[00:04:00]  And you mentioned rights.
[00:04:02]  So of the rights that we assess, freedom of personal expression, freedom of the media, and due process were most affected during that 20-year decline.
[00:04:11]  So would we say media freedom, personal expression, due process?
[00:04:14]  What does that mean for everyday people who are engaging, you know, who are reading the newspaper, who are posting on sites like X or Facebook?
[00:04:25]  What does it actually mean for Americans?
[00:04:29]  Sure.
[00:04:29]  So in the U.S., actually, the two or sorry, the three indicators that declined were personal expression, the functioning of government, and our corruption indicator.
[00:04:44]  And I can talk about those separately.
[00:04:46]  But on your question around the media, so it means a lot of things, right?
[00:04:49]  It means that in the U.S., there is a shrinking media market and there is concentrated ownership and there are also media deserts.
[00:04:59]  So that means that folks don't have as much access to media.
[00:05:02]  There's also greater bipartisan or partisan control of the media.
[00:05:06]  So the media you do have access to slants one way or another.
[00:05:11]  And then you also have competition between traditional media and social media, which also creates kind of economic pressures.
[00:05:18]  And then separate from that, you know, you have sort of government pressure on media and kind of the chilling effect that that has also had.
[00:05:28]  I should be clear, the media score for the U.S. this in 2025 did not decline, but it was already imperfect at a three out of four.
[00:05:37]  Now, something you co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Post in which you write, a mere 21% of the world's population now lives in a country rated free.
[00:05:49]  That's down from 46% in 2005.
[00:05:55]  What's contributing to this?

=== The Precipitous Drop in Liberty (04:59) ===

[00:05:57]  This, I mean, kind of precipitous drop in freedom over the last, you know, 20 years.
[00:06:02]  Absolutely.
[00:06:03]  So what we do is we assess every country and territory on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest.
[00:06:10]  And then that score also translates into a status, free, partly free, and not free.
[00:06:16]  And so today, as you say, we have only 21% of the world's population that lives in a country we rate as free.
[00:06:24]  39% lives in a partly free country, and 40% lives in a not-free country.
[00:06:30]  And as you observe, there's been a steady drop.
[00:06:32]  A lot of that drop, honestly, if you just look at the population, is because India dropped out of the free category and became partly free a few years ago.
[00:06:40]  So obviously that explains a lot of the global proportion.
[00:06:43]  But more generally, what we've seen over the last 20 years is a number of factors.
[00:06:48]  So there are a lot of military coups now, especially in Africa.
[00:06:52]  And those are really detrimental to freedoms and they destroy political institutions.
[00:06:57]  We've also seen growing repression in already authoritarian countries.
[00:07:01]  You can see that in Russia or China and some of these other places.
[00:07:05]  But then we also have seen democratically elected leaders try to undermine the institutions that are checks on their own power.
[00:07:14]  And we're increasingly seeing that as a driver of decline in freedom as well.
[00:07:19]  Now, before we continue, Yana, I want to invite our viewers to join in on our conversation.
[00:07:25]  We're talking about freedoms across the globe, including here in the U.S. Democrats.
[00:07:29]  Your line is 202-748-8000.
[00:07:32]  Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001.
[00:07:36]  Independents, your line is 202-748-8003.
[00:07:41]  You can also reach us by text message.
[00:07:43]  That is 202-748-8003.
[00:07:46]  Just send your first name, city, and state.
[00:07:50]  Now, I know that we talked about what was contributing to it and some of the specific freedoms, but are there any more freedoms that have kind of topped the list of being in danger in 2025?
[00:08:06]  Well, I mean, I think looking across the field, you know, some of the things that I find striking.
[00:08:10]  So, we talked a little bit about media freedom, but it's also important, the freedom of expression of ordinary people in their everyday life is also being infringed on.
[00:08:20]  What we're seeing is the rise of surveillance, the rise of the use of spyware, and honestly, also just reprisals for ordinary speech that might be controversial.
[00:08:29]  And so, we're seeing that people are self-censoring themselves, not only around the world, but also in the United States and in other established democracies.
[00:08:39]  And that's something that worries me because I think you need freedom of personal expression is really important for debating ideas, for living kind of in a healthy democratic society.
[00:08:52]  Now, we talked a little bit about the U.S., but can you give us kind of the top and the bottom of where these countries who perform the best and the worst are?
[00:09:03]  And where is the U.S. in that scale?
[00:09:06]  Sure.
[00:09:07]  So, the United States, the score currently is 81 out of 100.
[00:09:11]  It's still rated free.
[00:09:14]  The very top of our index, so those countries that get 100 or 99, actually Finland gets 100 consistently.
[00:09:21]  Finland has gotten 100 for a few years.
[00:09:23]  Norway, New Zealand are at the very top with 99, 98.
[00:09:28]  At the very bottom, you often see countries that are experiencing armed conflict or just very prolonged authoritarianism.
[00:09:37]  So, very bottom of the list are countries like South Sudan, Turkmenistan, and then sort of in the near the bottom, but maybe not at the very bottom, you have China, which is a 9 out of 100.
[00:09:51]  Russia is a 12 out of 100, Iran is a 10 out of 100.
[00:09:55]  So, to give you some idea of the scope.
[00:09:59]  And something else that you guys had within the report, you know, obviously you said that, you know, the U.S. was at an 81 out of 100.
[00:10:07]  It's still free, but it has seen a major decline.
[00:10:12]  You say in the United States, an escalation in both legislative dysfunction and executive dominance, growing pressure on people's ability to engage in free expression, and the new administration's moves to undermine anti-corruption safeguards all contributed to the negative score change.
[00:10:29]  The United States lost three points on the report's 100-point scale, bringing its net decline, bringing its net decline since 2005 to 12 points and more than any other country rated free during the same period, except for Nauru and Bulgaria.
[00:10:49]  How should Americans think about this?
[00:10:51]  We talked about the media bit being a contributing factor, but what else?

=== Assessing Fundamental Rights Globally (15:22) ===

[00:10:56]  Right.
[00:10:56]  So, you know, I think it's important to kind of look at the decline over time and sort of put it in perspective.
[00:11:02]  The U.S. score has declined by 12 points since 2005.
[00:11:07]  And that's substantial.
[00:11:08]  To kind of put it in context, that is a bigger decline than Brazil or South Africa.
[00:11:15]  That is a bigger decline than the member states of the European Union, which have only declined by about three points.
[00:11:20]  It's a much smaller decline than Hungary has seen or that India has seen over the same period of time.
[00:11:28]  And over the last two decades, there's been a number of different factors.
[00:11:33]  So greater polarization in our political system has contributed to more dysfunction and sort of stymied legislative action.
[00:11:46]  So that's contributed to it.
[00:11:47]  The growing role of money in politics, unfortunately, has contributed to it.
[00:11:52]  Greater restrictions on the ability to vote, making voting more difficult, has contributed to this, but also other things.
[00:11:59]  So, certain kind of social issues.
[00:12:02]  Academic freedom has declined, both in primary schools but also at universities.
[00:12:08]  We've seen a decline in our due process in our rule of law because of incarceration rates, because of how long it takes to get to trial, kind of all of those issues in the criminal justice system.
[00:12:21]  So, it's been, you know, it's been an unfortunate deterioration over time.
[00:12:27]  It has been substantial, and it's been sort of across aspects of both our political and social system.
[00:12:34]  All right, let's turn to some phone calls.
[00:12:36]  Barbara from Vermont, a Republican.
[00:12:39]  Good morning, Barbara.
[00:12:41]  Excuse me.
[00:12:42]  Hi.
[00:12:42]  Hi, Barbara.
[00:12:43]  Good morning.
[00:12:44]  Hi.
[00:12:44]  So I did hear the speaker touch lightly on Western Europe.
[00:12:51]  Now, I don't know when these statistics or whatever your, you know, it came out, like your policy or whatever you're speaking about, but Western Europe is in major decline as far as free speech.
[00:13:04]  And they're getting arrested over there for certain words on the internet, Facebook posts, blah, blah, blah.
[00:13:12]  We even heard months back where I think it was in Britain, they wanted to come over to America and arrest people saying things they did not approve of.
[00:13:22]  So, and then let's go back to when Joe Biden was also in office.
[00:13:27]  And he pretty much, it didn't happen because Trump came in, but he was monitoring that internet like never before.
[00:13:36]  So please talk about Western Europe, Britain, Ireland.
[00:13:41]  There's a lot of clampdown, big clampdown on freedom of speech.
[00:13:46]  Thank you.
[00:13:49]  I wonder if you have a response to that, Jana.
[00:13:51]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:13:53]  Actually, the U.S. score on freedom of expression, private expression, is now the same as it is in the UK and Germany.
[00:13:59]  And so I think we are capturing actually what the caller was talking about.
[00:14:04]  You know, I think it's important where there are government efforts to monitor or regulate speech online.
[00:14:13]  When those efforts follow due process, I think those can be rights respecting.
[00:14:17]  It's a question of when they don't follow due process, when they're arbitrary or when they lead to, you know, unjust punishments.
[00:14:25]  I think that's where we view it as a problem.
[00:14:28]  But indeed, the U.S. score actually does match those other countries in Western Europe.
[00:14:33]  Alan from Wisconsin, an independent.
[00:14:38]  Go ahead, Alan.
[00:14:39]  Good morning, Jana.
[00:14:41]  I appreciate this program very much.
[00:14:43]  I wanted to point out that the founding fathers, John Adams, specifically said that there are two ways to conquer and enslave a country.
[00:14:50]  One is by the sword, the other is by debt.
[00:14:54]  And you mentioned 2005.
[00:14:56]  Well, it's interesting that in 2005, bankruptcy protections, which the founders called for in the Constitution ahead of all the rights listed in the Bill of Rights, bankruptcy protections were removed from student loans.
[00:15:09]  And so I'm just wondering if you looked at student loans specifically in your analysis, because I can tell you that this is the camel's nose under the tent.
[00:15:20]  If they can remove constitutional bankruptcy rights from student loans, they can take them away from credit cards and medical debt.
[00:15:28]  And there are some very dark forces in this country that would love to do that.
[00:15:33]  And the student loan canary in the coal mine is something that everybody should care about in this country if they want freedom.
[00:15:43]  Yana?
[00:15:45]  Well, we actually do assess some economic aspects in our index.
[00:15:51]  I want to say again that it's based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and so it's not based on any given country's constitution or founding documents.
[00:16:00]  And we do that because we want to be comparative, we want to be fair to every country.
[00:16:05]  But saying that, we do assess property rights and we assess the level of economic exploitation.
[00:16:11]  We don't go down all the way down to the level of student loans and things like that.
[00:16:16]  But certainly, I think the bigger issue of economic and social inequality is something that's reflected in the index and something that has impacted U.S. scores over time.
[00:16:25]  Okay, some questions we're getting via text message and online.
[00:16:29]  The first one is from Zelda in Delaware.
[00:16:32]  Do you expect the U.S. score to go down because of major media mergers like Sky Dance, et cetera?
[00:16:38]  That was the one that we were just talking about of Paramount buying or attempting to buy Warner Brothers.
[00:16:45]  I mean, as a researcher, I don't want to prejudge anything.
[00:16:50]  I will say that in the coming year, so in this year, 2026, I am watching the U.S. media score.
[00:16:56]  I think I'm maybe concerned about the shrinking or concentration of media ownership.
[00:17:03]  Certainly, I think another concern is the FCC's greater or more aggressive stance on media in the U.S.
[00:17:14]  But certainly that's an issue that we're going to watch.
[00:17:16]  Another question from online here is from Aaron.
[00:17:20]  It says, How is New Zealand considered to have more free speech than the U.S. when they've taken their personal weapons from them already?
[00:17:31]  Well, the issue of weapons and speech is not connected in our index.
[00:17:37]  New Zealand has quite a high score because in most areas they have respecting fundamental freedoms, essentially.
[00:17:47]  Again, we are using a global lens to look at these issues.
[00:17:52]  We're not looking at any specific country's constitution or their founding documents.
[00:17:57]  And so we need to have kind of an equal bar to assess these issues.
[00:18:03]  Another person writes in, How has free expression declined in the U.S.?
[00:18:08]  The ability to express yourself has greatly expanded free speech here.
[00:18:13]  I don't buy it.
[00:18:15]  Sure.
[00:18:16]  I think our technological ability to express ourselves in the U.S. and elsewhere has obviously expanded with the digital revolution over the past few years.
[00:18:29]  But at the same time, what we're seeing, and I should be clear, the change we're registering in the freedom of expression score for the U.S. is multi-year.
[00:18:37]  There were specific aspects that happened last year, and I can speak to those, but this has been a longer-term issue.
[00:18:43]  What we saw is that increasingly people are seeing disproportionate consequences, and not necessarily just from the government.
[00:18:52]  We're seeing reprisals, we're seeing doxing, we're seeing threats for people doing something as simple as just posting their opinion online.
[00:19:02]  And I think that that is actually a very serious threat to freedom of expression.
[00:19:06]  Our last comment here from online, it's specific to you, Jana.
[00:19:10]  It says, do you consult with Amnesty International?
[00:19:14]  We don't.
[00:19:15]  So in order to make our index sort of independent and preserve our editorial independence, we don't consult with any other organizations that issue any kind of assessments.
[00:19:28]  And we do that so that we don't fall into sort of an echo chamber where we're all basically saying the same thing.
[00:19:33]  We do rely on a network of over 150 analysts and advisors to provide some of the data and information that we're using.
[00:19:42]  And the majority of those analysts and advisors are based in the country where they're making the assessment or the territory.
[00:19:50]  So that's a little bit about how you guys assess the countries.
[00:19:53]  You say you basically use a universal document not tied to an individual's country's, say, constitution.
[00:20:00]  What other factors and metrics, what other factors and metrics does Freedom House use to create this report?
[00:20:11]  Sure.
[00:20:11]  So, you know, I'm very happy to talk about how we do this.
[00:20:15]  I spend a lot of my time doing it.
[00:20:16]  The report takes us about 10 months to make.
[00:20:19]  So we've just finished this report.
[00:20:21]  We're going to start the new report for 2026 very soon.
[00:20:25]  We have a methodology that is actually available on our website.
[00:20:29]  If anyone wants to take a look, it has very specific, so it has 25 indicators divided between political rights and civil liberties.
[00:20:35]  And then each indicator has sub-questions.
[00:20:37]  And the sub-questions are meant to illustrate what that indicator is about.
[00:20:41]  So if you look at our freedom of the media, you'll see, you know, issues around ownership, issues around regulation, issues around censorship, things like that.
[00:20:50]  Our analysts and advisors basically answer those questions and they provide us data points and various kind of evidence and sourcing.
[00:21:01]  We fact check all of that information.
[00:21:03]  And so the kind of data that we use is different depending on the indicators, but we use reports of arrests.
[00:21:12]  We use if there were protests in a country, we use data on those.
[00:21:15]  If there is any kind of policing data, for instance, in the U.S., we look at hate crime statistics that are issued by the FBI.
[00:21:24]  So we look at different data points and then we make sure that it's all factual, accurate.
[00:21:30]  And importantly, we are trying to assess real world impacts on rights.
[00:21:35]  So it means that we kind of look past a little bit the political rhetoric that may be happening in a country and we're looking at whether people are able to exercise those fundamental freedoms.
[00:21:46]  Tom from Fresno, California, an independent.
[00:21:50]  You are next.
[00:21:51]  Good morning, Tom.
[00:21:52]  Good morning.
[00:21:54]  My question, I see the global freedom declining.
[00:21:58]  I'm a 72-year-old African-American male, and I wanted to know if this young lady or her organization keeps the statistics of population decline.
[00:22:11]  1968, the president of the United States came on the air, and they wanted young black men in high school to go to their parents, who some could not read and write, and do the census.
[00:22:28]  It was not a gimmick to find out who was in this country or whatever it was during the 1968s, but they needed the citizens to do the census.
[00:22:40]  A year later, it came out that there were 41 million African Americans.
[00:22:45]  Today, what is that number?
[00:22:47]  If she could answer that question.
[00:22:49]  Thank you.
[00:22:49]  And I'll wait for her answer.
[00:22:53]  I'm not sure that I know the breakdown in the U.S.
[00:22:57]  We do use, basically we do issue what the population is, but we use a UN source for that.
[00:23:04]  So we have for every country, you see what the population is.
[00:23:07]  And that's part of the reason I'm able to say that 21% of the world's population lives in a country that's rated free.
[00:23:13]  So we do use population data, but not specifically for at the national level, these other breakdowns, I'm afraid.
[00:23:20]  All right, Yana, a question from online here, David from South Carolina.
[00:23:27]  It says, when you study freedoms in the U.S., excuse me, when you study freedoms in the U.S. versus communists in countries ruled by supreme leaders, do you have to use varying scales and definitions to compensate for the vastly different degrees of freedom?
[00:23:45]  So, no, that's one of the, I think, one of the strengths of what we're doing.
[00:23:49]  We are using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
[00:23:52]  And I should say the reason we use the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a source for our methodology is because this is not a standard that we as an organization, or indeed we as Americans, are imposing on other countries.
[00:24:05]  This is a founding document that much of international conventions come from, and this is something that governments in other countries have agreed to as basic rights that they are upholding.
[00:24:19]  And so, that means that when we look at the level of freedom in a given country, we are using that universal measure rather than the local measure.
[00:24:29]  And I think that makes sense because, unfortunately, you know, what we've seen is authoritarian governments cancel elections, you know, completely disrupt the judiciary.
[00:24:41]  And so, the things that they are doing may be considered legal under their own legal systems, but there are certainly violations of rights.
[00:24:52]  Thomas from Del Rey Beach, Florida, he says, it's absurd that Finland has a perfect 100 score considering all male citizens are forcibly constricted, conscripted into the military or go to prison for six months.
[00:25:06]  I wonder, is that a factor in how you guys decide?
[00:25:10]  I don't know the details of conscription in Finland.
[00:25:14]  Certainly, there are many other countries where there is some form of national service.
[00:25:20]  South Korea has national service.
[00:25:23]  Many of those countries enjoy quite a high level of freedom.
[00:25:27]  And so, I think, again, as long as those requirements are following due process and you have options in terms of serving or not, I think that we don't view that as a hindrance on freedom.
[00:25:44]  Tommy from Alabama, a Republican.
[00:25:48]  Morning, Tommy.
[00:25:49]  Hi.
[00:25:50]  Hi.
[00:25:51]  What I was wanting to know is the Democrats' policies on dethund the police, dethund the military, and open borders to show in their leaning mainly to Marxism and socialists.
[00:26:14]  Bernie Sanders is the leader of the Democratic Party now.

=== Early Warning Systems for Chaos (09:55) ===

[00:26:19]  And I'm wondering if that is going to be taking away our freedom in the United States.
[00:26:29]  We do look at physical safety.
[00:26:31]  That's very important, obviously.
[00:26:34]  Often we don't think about that as sort of a fundamental right, but it's really the building block of the exercise of all other rights, which is why you see countries that are experiencing armed conflict or sustained, you know, kind of chaos, as in the case of Haiti.
[00:26:50]  That score is really low.
[00:26:51]  So for the U.S., it is something that we look at in terms of crime rates and people's ability to be free of basically extrajudicial or other forms of violence.
[00:27:04]  So that's something that's incorporated into the index for the U.S. and for all other countries and territories.
[00:27:10]  Another question from online, Sally Sue on Twitter.
[00:27:14]  She asks, what early warning signs should citizens watch for in their own countries that indicate a shift from democratic norms toward authoritarian practices?
[00:27:26]  Oh, I think that's a really great question.
[00:27:28]  That is something that we have looked at in the past, sort of these early warning systems.
[00:27:34]  So maybe just to take media freedom since we talked about it and since this is a media outlet, to look at media freedom.
[00:27:42]  So I think when people think about freedom of the media, they often think about, you know, arresting or killing journalists or maybe censoring or shutting down media outlets.
[00:27:54]  But in democracies, the attacks tend to be different.
[00:27:58]  So what we see in a lot of democracies that are declining, we see concentrated ownership of the media.
[00:28:05]  That's certainly something.
[00:28:06]  And that ownership usually is aligned with the political forces that are in power, which obviously leads to sort of a slanting of the coverage.
[00:28:16]  We also see various legal attacks on the media.
[00:28:19]  So something that has unfortunately arisen a lot in Europe is the use of lawsuits against the media, so so-called slap suits against the media.
[00:28:30]  And that is an intimidation tactic because often these suits really cost a lot of money and they take a lot of time.
[00:28:37]  And so they send a message to investigative journalists and others that you should not investigate those in power or sort of the powerful because you will pay for that sort of with your time and money in courts.
[00:28:50]  And so those are some of the early kind of warning systems.
[00:28:53]  I have you talk about other areas of democracy that tend to also suffer.
[00:28:59]  I guess the point I want to make is that it's often sort of this chipping away at the corners.
[00:29:02]  It's very rare that it's a kind of a sudden full-blown attack.
[00:29:06]  Dana from Canton, Ohio, an independent.
[00:29:09]  Good morning, Dana.
[00:29:12]  I was wondering, there was a pipeline they were building from Alaska down to the United States.
[00:29:19]  And I was wondering what happened to that because Biden stopped it.
[00:29:25]  And we're talking about freedoms across the globe here.
[00:29:32]  I'll try to, if I have time, to look for you on an answer on that pipeline.
[00:29:35]  But do you have a question for Jana about this Freedom House report?
[00:29:38]  Okay, I got a question real quick because we still don't know who Iran is, you know, who the military, you know, who's ahead of the state now or whatever you want to call it country.
[00:29:54]  And why isn't Spain cooperating with the U.S.?
[00:30:01]  All right.
[00:30:01]  I wonder if you can tackle any of those questions.
[00:30:05]  I mean, on Iran, Iran has a score of 10 out of 100.
[00:30:10]  It's rated not free.
[00:30:12]  It's a, you know, it's a deeply authoritarian country.
[00:30:17]  I will say that, you know, every year this report or for the last 20 years, which is longer than I have been working on it, unfortunately, we're always delivering bad news that global freedom has declined.
[00:30:30]  And we're often talking about these really repressive places.
[00:30:34]  But in every repressive regime, there is always a deep desire for freedom.
[00:30:39]  And that includes Iran.
[00:30:40]  In Iran, very brave people have gone out into the streets to defend their fundamental rights time and time again.
[00:30:47]  And we've seen this in other places.
[00:30:50]  And so I think that's something that gets a little bit lost when we talk about sort of general trends.
[00:30:54]  And obviously people are worried about attacks on democracy.
[00:30:57]  But it's something that I find really inspiring.
[00:31:00]  And so I always want to, if I have a chance, I want to talk about that a little bit as well.
[00:31:03]  Yeah, I was going to ask you about some positive findings, but just quickly, just to get a little bit negative first, is, you know, it's been 53 years since Freedom House started tracking this report.
[00:31:13]  Has there ever been a point in those 53 years that it was worse than what it is today?
[00:31:21]  Oh, I mean, certainly before the end of the Cold War, you had most of the world's population living in an authoritarian country with great restrictions on their freedom.
[00:31:33]  So, you know, I think that's also important to keep in perspective.
[00:31:37]  Certainly, you know, before the fall of the Soviet Union, also before, you know, it may be hard for people to remember, but in the early 1970s, I mean, Spain and Portugal were authoritarian countries.
[00:31:52]  And so, you know, that was even before the fall of the Soviet Union.
[00:31:55]  So certainly things have been worse in the past than they are now globally.
[00:32:00]  What else positive can people look to inside of the report?
[00:32:07]  Well, so a couple of things.
[00:32:08]  One is we had three status changes in 2025.
[00:32:13]  So this is when countries move between our three categories.
[00:32:15]  And for the first time in the last 20 years, all three were positive.
[00:32:19]  And not only were they positive, they were sort of the best kind of news, which is countries went from partly free to free.
[00:32:26]  And that was Bolivia, Fiji, and Malawi.
[00:32:30]  And it was a combination of peaceful elections that led to transfers of power, but also improvements in social rights.
[00:32:36]  But stepping back, one of the things that I also find really inspiring is that democracies are really enduring.
[00:32:44]  So during this last 20 years, over 80% of the countries that started as free countries in 2005 have maintained that freedom.
[00:32:54]  So they haven't dropped out of that status this entire time.
[00:32:57]  So I think that's really positive.
[00:32:59]  Democracies are self-correcting systems.
[00:33:02]  They have the capacity to overcome conflict, division, all of these sorts of things.
[00:33:07]  And it's not to say that folks shouldn't guard those freedoms and shouldn't actively participate in that, but it's to say that democracies are really resilient systems.
[00:33:19]  Bill from Billings, Montana, Republican.
[00:33:23]  Good morning.
[00:33:24]  I really just looking back at the COVID mess that we had in the country.
[00:33:30]  You know, the government had total control.
[00:33:34]  They told the medical community, if you offer the T-word treatment for COVID, you would lose all of your medical government funding, which most places, that's what they run on.
[00:33:48]  If you were in the military and refused to take the jab, you were thrown out.
[00:33:54]  If you had a small business like I did, you had to close hundreds of thousands.
[00:34:01]  Total government control.
[00:34:03]  We were being run by a dictator named Joe Biden.
[00:34:08]  And I saw what a disaster that was for our country.
[00:34:12]  Did that figure into losing our freedoms to much of an extent in your study?
[00:34:18]  Thank you.
[00:34:22]  2020 was actually the worst year on record for global freedom in the way that we assess.
[00:34:29]  And what I mean by that is not only more countries declined than improved, but also the degree of decline was really extreme.
[00:34:35]  A lot of that was not here in the United States, but elsewhere.
[00:34:39]  But it did have to do with arbitrary and harsh restrictions on freedom.
[00:34:44]  A lot of governments in mostly authoritarian spaces use the, if you think about China, use the pandemic to restrict people's movement, their expression, and lots of other fundamental freedoms.
[00:35:00]  The key difference, as I think I said already, is whether those restrictions were following the law, whether they were following due process, whether they were equal.
[00:35:10]  And in many places in the world, they were not.
[00:35:13]  My last question for you, Jana, if you could answer in about 30 seconds here, is given the ongoing war, wars, now the Iran war erupting, I know you guys said that you are starting in just a few weeks, but what can we expect from next year's report?
[00:35:31]  Well, we're starting the work right now.
[00:35:32]  There's lots of things that I'm going to be watching.
[00:35:35]  There's certainly the armed conflict.
[00:35:37]  You know, I want to mention there's still an armed conflict in Sudan.
[00:35:41]  Many people are suffering.
[00:35:42]  There are many important elections.
[00:35:44]  There's the midterms coming up here in the U.S. There is elections in Hungary happening in a few weeks.
[00:35:50]  So we're watching all of those factors.
[00:35:52]  And so stay tuned for the next report.
[00:35:55]  All right, Jana Gorohovskaya of the Freedom House Research Director of Strategy Design.
[00:36:00]  Thank you so much for joining us this morning.
[00:36:02]  Thanks so much.
[00:36:04]  And that's all we have for Washington Journal.
[00:36:06]  Another edition comes at you tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern.
[00:36:11]  We'll see you there.

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