Belgrade reacts to Freedom House report based on personal impressions

N1

A day after the Freedom House published its world report showing Serbia lowered ranking from Free to Partly Free country, Belgrade officials said it was not objective, N1 reported.

The report said Serbia was among the countries with the most significant one-year declines, scoring 67 of a possible 100 points, dropping six points compared to a year earlier when it was among the Free countries in the world.

Earlier on Wednesday, Serbia’s Prime Minister Ana Brnabic voiced disagreement with the report saying that the report was not sufficiently objective.

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 “The Freedom House report is relevant to me, but I do not agree with it. I do not think and do not feel that I live in a partly free country but rather that I live in a country which is freer than it was a few years ago,” she said.

Nela Kuburovic, the Justice Minister, later said that “not everything was that dark as it is presented.”

“You know what, one should read the report as a whole. When you do that, you will see that the comments are not that bad, as when one sentence is taken out of context,“ Kuburovic said.

N1 read the whole report to find out that Serbia was mentioned four times in it. First as one of four countries with the most drastic fall in the human rights area, together with Nicaragua, Tanzania and Venezuela.

The second time, Serbia was referred to as the country with anti-democratic leaders like President Aleksandar Vucic, along with Montenegro’s head of state Milo Djukanovic.

Serbia was also singled out as a country which lost the freedom status because of the violation of election process and attacks on journalists and once more on the chart showing the deterioration of democracy.