In Europe and Eurasia, governments are failing to uphold the rights and freedoms of citizens. To protect the most vulnerable, governments within and outside the region should shore up democratic institutions.
Democratic governance declined for the 20th consecutive year in the 29 countries stretching from Central Europe to Central Asia, according to Freedom House’s latest edition of Nations in Transit. This decades-long decline has had a real human cost—most gravely in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, as autocrats in Russia and Azerbaijan intensified violent aggression abroad in 2023.
But alongside these military assaults, leaders across the region are also endangering citizens by letting the institutions of government decay. These include anticorruption bodies, independent judiciaries, and systems that protect women, ethnic minorities, and LGBT+ people from serious abuses. In some places leaders have gone further, weaponizing hateful rhetoric and abusing these institutions to repress entire populations. These shifts have had real and devastating consequences, as protections for people’s fundamental rights are stripped away.
In 2023, health care scandals throughout the region revealed failures in transparency and accountability, especially in countries with weak or unstable governance. In North Macedonia, prosecutors failed to file charges against Ministry of Health officials, whom the public blames for documented neglect, mismanagement, and corruption leading to a deadly 2021 fire in a COVID-19 clinic. This news broke as a renowned public oncology clinic in Skopje was revealed to be a hub for organized crime. Despite public protests, the government moved not to shore up anticorruption protections, but rather to weaken corruption penalties in the aftermath of these revelations. Similar scandals plagued Romania, where “horror asylums” facilitated widespread exploitation and abuse of disabled and elderly people in state-funded care centers. As in North Macedonia, years of public pressure, and evidence implicating Romanian officials, have not led to reforms.
Meanwhile, increasingly politicized and ineffective judicial systems have allowed gender-based violence to proliferate in many parts of the region. In southeastern Europe, continued impunity for rape and femicide was again thrust into the spotlight in 2023, with fatal attacks by repeat offenders in Albania, Bulgaria, and elsewhere, sparking protests in several countries. The short sentence handed down to a well-known Czech politician convicted of rape in November 2023 illustrates that even the strongest democracies can fail to hold perpetrators of sexual violence accountable.
Hateful, anti-LGBT+ rhetoric is becoming a legislative reality in parts of the region, with real-world consequences. Last year, Hungary started enforcing via hefty fines its 2021 “child protection” law, which bans educational content featuring LGBT+ topics. The move, and its apparent popularity among some on the far right, has sparked fears that other right-wing or illiberal governments will follow suit with new laws that target LGBT+ people. One such country is Slovakia, where Robert Fico’s anti-LGBT+ campaigning helped spur his victory in the 2023 elections.
The targeting of the LGBT+ community in Central Europe pales in comparison to Eurasian autocracies, which continue to use every legal tool at their disposal to erase these individuals from the public eye. In Russia, where LGBT+ people are already subject to serious legal and societal discrimination, a 2023 Supreme Court decision labeled “the LGBT movement” an extremist organization, making LGBT+ individuals and anyone who advocates on their behalf eligible for serious punishment. A number of arrests have been reported this year already. At the start of 2024, the Belarusian prosecutor general followed suit by proposing a bill that would punish “the promotion of nontraditional relationships” and penalize “voluntary refusal to have children.”
Members of ethnic and religious minority groups also came under renewed attack. In Czechia, where Romany people have endured longtime institutional segregation, Ukrainian Roma refugees were denied assistance offered to other Ukrainian refugees. In Tajikistan, the authoritarian government of President Emomali Rahmon expanded a campaign of forced cultural and religious assimilation of the Pamiri minority, which it does not recognize as a distinct community. In 2023, security forces intensified violent crackdowns on members of Pamiris wrongfully accused of inciting unrest, separatism, or terrorism. The Tajik government also shut down civic and political groups providing the community with essential services.
The events of 2023 exposed the failure of governing institutions to perform their core functions of upholding citizens’ rights and freedoms. These institutional failures have had devastating consequences, underscoring that Nations in Transit’s annual assessment of core democratic institutions is not merely an intellectual exercise.
To protect citizens and shore up democracy in the region, it is imperative that democratic leaders in the United States, Europe, and further afield continue to bolster local actors in their fight for institutional reforms. Through targeted assistance and engagement, the United States, European Union, and international donor community should support government and civic initiatives that strengthen legal protections for vulnerable communities and build the capacity of independent courts, investigators, and anticorruption organizations to protect the fundamental human rights of all, not just a privileged few. Subject to further political abuse or simply left to wither away, the decline of this region’s institutions will further endanger citizens’ rights, safety, and well-being.
Source : (Freedom House – April 11, 2024)