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By Francis Earl A. Cueto, Reporter
The United States government denied involvement
in a scathing report of the US-based conservative democracy watchdog
Freedom House that delisted the Philippines from the world’s
democracies, saying it is only “partly free.”
US Embassy spokesman Rebecca Thompson on
Tuesday said the United States government did not commission the
Freedom House report. She added that they would rather not comment
or simply stay away from any pronouncement made by a private group.
Thompson said it would be better for the
best interests of the US and the Philippines to shy away from making
further statements about the state of freedom in the Philippines.
“It’s better to let it be itself, if
that is not from the US government report, so that’s not our
concern. It’s a private organization. That is not a report of the
US government,” she said of the Freedom House report.
The Philippines received the same
“partly free” rating from Freedom House in 2006, with the report
for that year released in early 2007. The report for 2007 was
released in the third week of January 2008.
Another conservative think-tank, Heritage House,
downgraded its rating of the Philippine economy to “mostly unfree”
due to alleged corruption and a weak judiciary under the watch of
President Gloria Arroyo.
In its 2007 report, Freedom House cited a
“serious decline” in freedom in the Philippines due to serious,
high-level corruption allegations, and an upsurge in political
killings, among other low points.
The think tank defines a “free
country” as one where there is “broad scope for open political
competition, a climate of respect for civil liberties, significant
independent civic life, and independent media.”
A “partly free” country is one where
there is “limited respect for political rights and civil
liberties.”
Such states also “frequently suffer from
an environment of corruption, weak rule of law, ethnic and religious
strife, and often a setting in which a single political party enjoys
dominance, despite the facade of limited pluralism.”
Freedom House said 36 percent of the
people in the world and about half of them in China do not live in
freedom.
The Philippines received a downward trend
arrow for a spate of political killings specifically targeting
left-wing political activists, the organization’s website said.
Reversals in freedom were seen in
one-fifth of the world’s countries, including Pakistan, Kenya,
Egypt, Nigeria and Venezuela. One country, Mauritania, joined the
list of democracies, while three—the Philippines, Bangladesh and
Kenya—dropped off it to “partly free.” Two countries, Thailand
and Togo, were upgraded from “not free” to “partly free.”
While the number of countries judged not
free declined by two to 43 last year, “(there) were many and
overwhelmingly negative changes within countries already designated
not free,” the survey found.
The number of countries judged “free” stood
at 90, representing 47 percent of the world’s 193 countries, and
those considered partly free stood at 60, or 31 percent.
Those found not free accounted for nearly
2.4 billion people, about half of them in China.
Expectations of government concessions on
human rights or modest democratic reforms ahead of the 2008 Summer
Olympics in Beijing did not pan out in China, where the government
continued to crack down on political activists, Internet journalists
and human-rights lawyers, the report said.
Foreign governments and international
groups such as the United Nations and the International Committee to
Protect Journalists have all raised concern over the allegedly
worsening human rights situation in the country.
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