Global Expression Report 2023

"The number of people living in countries that restrict freedom of expression is at the highest point in two decades."

The Global Expression Report, published annually by ARTICLE 19, examines trends in citizens' right to freedom of expression and information - globally, regionally, and nationally. The report, which in 2023 presents the data-driven study as an interactive set of maps and visualisations, seeks to provide a concrete measure and quantifiable perspective on expression: from posting online to protesting, investigating, and accessing the information needed to keep leaders accountable.

Using the Global Expression Report's metric (the GxR Metric), researchers track freedom of expression across 161 countries using 25 indicators to create an overall freedom of expression score for every country on a scale of 1 to 100. The 25 indicators are taken from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Dataset, a data resource for examining the health of democracies around the world. The scoring enables researchers to place countries in an expression category that ranges from: Open, Less Restricted, Restricted, Highly Restricted, or Crisis. Besides global, country-specific, and regional analyses, the report explores changes in the Global Expression Score over time across 3 time periods: the last year (2021-2022), the last 5 years (2017-2022), and the last 10 years (2012-2022).

The following are some of the global trends highlighted in the report:

• Around the globe, 80% of people have less freedom of expression than a decade ago. That's more than 6 billion people in more than 80 countries.
• The Global Expression Score (the mean average of country scores) has seen a 6-point decline since 2012, but the Human Score (weighted by population), which shows the real cost of that loss, has dropped 13 points in just 10 years.
• The divergence between these scores is relatively new: Between 2000 and 2012, the Human Score held steady - more or less in line with the Global Expression Score - but declines began to accelerate after 2012.
• There are more countries in which freedoms are in decline than countries seeing rises in expression. What's more, the countries in decline contain many more people than countries in advance, which tend to have much smaller populations.

Each regional analysis includes information about scores, rankings, progress, and declines and offers the ability to download the data. The following are some of the regional trends highlighted in the report:

Sub-Saharan Africa:

• Freedom of expression in Sub-Saharan Africa is stagnant. The region has an Expression Score of 43 and a Human Score of 45 (out of 100), both of which have held steady over the last 2 decades.
• The majority of countries in the region belong to the middle 3 expression categories (Less Restricted, Restricted, Highly Restricted), and there are no countries in the top category: Sub-Saharan Africa's last remaining Open country, Ghana, dropped out of the category in 2019.
• Over the past decade, there has been a combined score decline of 210 points for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a combined advance of 138 among countries in the region.
• However, there have been significant advances in the scores of a number of Sub-Saharan African states over the last decade, including The Gambia, Angola, Malawi, and Zambia.

Americas:

• In the Americas, losses in freedom are far larger than gains.
• Over the last few years, people in the Americas have experienced major losses in their freedom of expression.
• The Regional Expression Score has fallen 8 points in the last decade, but the Human Score has seen a 13-point drop over the same period, signalling the serious impact of restrictions being imposed on large populations.
• The Americas also have clear sub-regional tendencies: Countries in North America and the Southern Cone are Open, while Brazil and countries in Central America and the Caribbean tend to have more restricted expression environments.
• When one excludes the large populations of the United States and Canada to focus only on Latin America and the Caribbean, scores - particularly the Human Score - drop significantly: from 68 in the Americas to 58 in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Asia and the Pacific:

• 4 billion people in Asia and the Pacific are living with less freedom of expression than they had a decade ago.
• More than half the countries in this region have seen a decline in score over the last decade (52%), ranging from declines of 54 points in Hong Kong (China) to 3 points in Australia. This large range indicates the unusually broad range of experiences in this region.
• The Human Score for Asia and the Pacific has dropped 18 points in the last decade and is now just half of its Regional Expression Score - a bigger divide than in any other region.
• This gap is evidence of the dire situation in the region; countries with huge populations, like India and China, are facing declines for freedom of expression that affect the human rights of billions of people.

Europe and Central Asia:

• Europe and Central Asia is seeing a movement to the extremes: A growing number of people now live in countries that are either Open or in Crisis, with a clearer-than-ever contrast between the East and West of the region.
• The decline in the region's Human Score has accelerated over the last decade, but, even with the drop in scores, all the countries with the top 10 Global Expression Scores are still in this region.
• Nearly half (49%) of the countries in Europe and Central Asia have seen declines in their scores over the last decade.
• Over the last year alone, scores declined in 6 countries, while only 1 country's score advanced.

Middle East and North Africa:

• The Middle East and North Africa region has the lowest Regional Expression Score and Human Score in the world.
• Both scores saw a bump after the Arab Spring, but those gains have been incrementally eroded over the last 10 years.
• Not a single country in the region has been categorised as Open in the last two decades, and more than half (56%) the countries in the region are now in Crisis.
• Advances in expression are rare in the Middle East and North Africa: Neither over the last decade nor in the last year has a single country advanced in score. Between 2017 and 2022, however, Israel saw a 7-point increase.

The report also includes special analysis sections that highlight notable trends. They look, for example, at: the dangerous shifts from democratic governance towards autocratic and authoritarian systems around the world; the impact of Russia's war on Ukraine on freedom of expression; countries experiencing perpetual repression such as China and Iran; the impact of non-democratic changes in power, such as in Nicaragua and Belarus; and the declining level of freedom of expression in Tunisia, considered the success story of the Arab Spring. Finally, the report highlights the following success stories (under "Brights Spots in the Dark"): Countries with democratic transfers of power to liberal parties and coalition over the last year - like Colombia (+15), Lesotho (+6), and Slovenia (+11) - saw significant hikes in their Expression Scores. Zambia's score rose by 31 points in 2022 amid the removal of defamation against the President from the criminal code, while Tanzania's score rose 6 points, as the country removed a longstanding ban on opposition political parties following the death of former President John Magafuli.

In conclusion, the report makes the point that "as we intensify our collective efforts to reverse the alarming trends summarised in this report, it is we - citizens, organisers, leaders, and law-makers - who must continue to make the case for positive change."